Question

I have an app developed for a Droid (phone). In the app, I use:

Bitmap b = BitmapFactory.decodeResource(getResources(), R.drawable.bg);

To set the background bitmap in the application. The bitmap is sized 480×800
which is the WVGA screen size of the Droid (without status or title bar).

Two questions:
When I rotate the phone, the Droid goes into landscape mode and the background no longer fits correctly. How do I tell the App it needs to use landscape mode when I’m not using a layout?

Second, when I run this app on the Xoom, it picks the mdpi drawable which is nowhere near the size of the Xoom screen. How do I define a second mdpi drawable that has a 1280×800 size? I think if I were using layouts, I would create a layout-xlarge directory and place a 1280×800 background in the imageview of that layout, correct?

Thanks!

Update *:
Thanks for the great answers! I upvoted everyone.
I updated the code to use drawable-xlarge-port/drawable-xlarge-land for the Xoom and drawable-port-mdpi/drawable-land-mdpi for the Droid.

I’m not using layouts as I needed to draw directly onto the activity canvas and not sure how to use setContentView() from within the class where I extend View and hook into onDraw() in order to do the animation (would need to be a separate posting).

If I can figure out how to rotate the image myself I could indeed do away with the drawable-*-land and *-port directories.

Answer 1

You can target drawables, not just layouts. You want drawable-hdpi-large-long-land for the first situation (assuming you’re letting the system handle rotation events and recreate your activity), and drawable-mdpi-xlarge for the second.

Of course it’s futile to try to ship with a separate image for every conceivable phone resolution; partially because there’s a lot you’d need, and partially because some targets aren’t differentiable (the 854×480 and 800×480 phones out there are all hdpi-large-long, for example, despite the 54px difference). Try to use a scaleable image, a stretchable 9patch, or an image you can just fix at the top-right corner (you can define stretch behaviors using an XML-defined bitmapdrawable).