I’m taking my first steps in Android programming.
My application is to create entries in a database. For this task I have created a new Activity. All is fine – but I don’t really like how it looks.
Currently, the emulator shows this:
I’d like to have something similar to the “New Contact” Activity:
- Buttons at the bottom of the window, not directly below the other controls (I’ll hopefully figure that out myself)
- Buttons within a nice “box” like shown in the screenshot (what’s the control hosting the buttons here?)
- When soft-keyboard is displayed, the buttons should “move up”. If there’s not enough room, the entire area should be scrollable (I’ll try and figure that out myself too)
Which control hosts the buttons in the above “New contact” screenshot? I’d like to use the same for my buttons.

The contacts layout looks like a ListView sitting on top of some sort of RelativeLayout or LinearLayout housing the buttons. The silver background may simply have been set using android:background on the Layout itself (layouts are views).
I found that the commonsware books are excellent resources for getting started and have good examples for this type of layout.