Question

The first image is from a Galaxy Note, the second is from a Droid 3. Both of them produced from the below code.

The dialog on the Droid 3 has a significant amount of extra, ugly space. This space is even uglier on more complex dialogs. Is there any way to prevent it?

public void onCreate(Bundle bundle)
    {
        super.onCreate(bundle);

        TextView tv = new TextView(this);
        tv.setText("Hello!");

        Dialog dialog = new Dialog(this);
        dialog.setContentView(tv);
        dialog.setTitle("Hi!");

        dialog.show();
    }

Answer 1

These Droid UI customizations drive me crazy!

If you’d like to control your dialogs to make them consistent across devices, you can strip them down to the basics with a constructor that supplies a style parameter. The following example gives a dialog that looks like this:

First, instantiate your dialog like this (or better yet, create a custom class that extends Dialog so you can reuse it):

Dialog dialog = new Dialog(context, android.R.style.Theme_Translucent_NoTitleBar);
dialog.setContentView(R.layout.custom_dialog_layout);

Then, supply a custom_dialog_layout.xml (could look something like this):

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<LinearLayout xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android"
    android:id="@+id/layout_root"
    style="@style/VerticalLinearLayout"
    android:background="@android:color/transparent"
    android:gravity="center_vertical|center_horizontal" >

    <LinearLayout
        android:id="@+id/dialog_layout"
        android:layout_width="wrap_content"
        android:layout_height="wrap_content"
        android:layout_margin="10dp"
        android:background="@drawable/dialog_background"
        android:orientation="vertical" >

        <TextView
            android:layout_width="fill_parent"
            android:layout_height="wrap_content"
            android:padding="5dp"
            android:textColor="@android:color/white"
            android:text="Hi!" />

        <TextView
            android:layout_width="fill_parent"
            android:layout_height="wrap_content"
            android:padding="5dp"
            android:textColor="@android:color/white"
            android:text="Hello!" />

    </LinearLayout>
</LinearLayout>

where dialog_background.xml looks something like this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<shape xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android" >

    <corners android:radius="10dp" />

    <stroke
        android:width="1dp"
        android:color="@android:color/black" />

    <gradient
        android:angle="0"
        android:startColor="@android:color/white"
        android:endColor="@android:color/white" />

</shape>

And if you really want to get fancy, you could try applying a drop shadow to the dialog_layout in code using something like this SO answer: https://stackoverflow.com/a/3723654/475217