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Let's take a look at how to create a theme. We'll inherit from parent themes, talk a little bit about the difference between themes and styles, and show you how to apply your theme in your app.
Creating a theme is an identical
process to creating a style but
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don't be fooled, they're different things.
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Remember, you can think of themes as
applying to each view of a layout,
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whereas the styles we're simply styling
that particular view to which the style
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has been applied.
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To create a theme we
actually use the style tag.
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I know that can be perhaps
more than slightly confusing,
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and I would have preferred that themes
be created with maybe theme tags, and
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I couldn't find any documentation
to why that isn't the case but
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I'm sure there was a good reason behind
that particular design decision.
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So let's create a theme
called settings theme and
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set its parent to
android:theme.material.noActionBar
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By setting the parent we inherit all
of the attributes from that theme.
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Material design was introduced
with Android 5.0 Lollipop, and
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provides developers with
a great set of tools for
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creating beautiful,
elegant user interfaces.
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The material theme in Android has
a concept of primary colors and
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accent colors.
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That, when applied to your theme,
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will give your Views personality
to match your brand.
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As you can see from the mo-cap on the left
we wanna use this cool green color
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in a bunch of different views,
using styles to do that would be a pain.
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Believe it or not, we can actually just
write one line of code here to apply
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that color to all of the Views
in our SettingsActivity.
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We'll do that now by creating a new item
with the name android:colorAccent and
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setting the value to our predefined
color called SettingsAccent.
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After we've created our theme,
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we need to tell Android to use
it with our SettingsActivity.
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To do that I'll just add an android:theme
to our SettingsActivity in the manifest
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and we'll be good to go.
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Let's run that and see what it looks like.
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I'll click through the SettingsActivity.
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Awesome, the color was applied to the
entire settings screen and we only had to
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apply the style once, rather than to every
single view in the SettingsActivity.
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In the next video let's see why we
need backwards compatibility, and
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learn how to implement
a backwards compatible theme.
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