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Creating a Theme

2:24 with Michael Lustig

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.

Documentation

Project Files

  • 0:00

    Creating a theme is an identical process to creating a style but

  • 0:03

    don't be fooled, they're different things.

  • 0:05

    Remember, you can think of themes as applying to each view of a layout,

  • 0:09

    whereas the styles we're simply styling that particular view to which the style

  • 0:13

    has been applied.

  • 0:14

    To create a theme we actually use the style tag.

  • 0:16

    I know that can be perhaps more than slightly confusing,

  • 0:19

    and I would have preferred that themes be created with maybe theme tags, and

  • 0:23

    I couldn't find any documentation to why that isn't the case but

  • 0:26

    I'm sure there was a good reason behind that particular design decision.

  • 0:29

    So let's create a theme called settings theme and

  • 0:33

    set its parent to android:theme.material.noActionBar

  • 0:49

    By setting the parent we inherit all of the attributes from that theme.

  • 0:53

    Material design was introduced with Android 5.0 Lollipop, and

  • 0:56

    provides developers with a great set of tools for

  • 0:58

    creating beautiful, elegant user interfaces.

  • 1:01

    The material theme in Android has a concept of primary colors and

  • 1:04

    accent colors.

  • 1:06

    That, when applied to your theme,

  • 1:08

    will give your Views personality to match your brand.

  • 1:10

    As you can see from the mo-cap on the left we wanna use this cool green color

  • 1:14

    in a bunch of different views, using styles to do that would be a pain.

  • 1:18

    Believe it or not, we can actually just write one line of code here to apply

  • 1:21

    that color to all of the Views in our SettingsActivity.

  • 1:24

    We'll do that now by creating a new item with the name android:colorAccent and

  • 1:28

    setting the value to our predefined color called SettingsAccent.

  • 1:36

    After we've created our theme,

  • 1:38

    we need to tell Android to use it with our SettingsActivity.

  • 1:41

    To do that I'll just add an android:theme to our SettingsActivity in the manifest

  • 1:45

    and we'll be good to go.

  • 1:58

    Let's run that and see what it looks like.

  • 2:03

    I'll click through the SettingsActivity.

  • 2:10

    Awesome, the color was applied to the entire settings screen and we only had to

  • 2:14

    apply the style once, rather than to every single view in the SettingsActivity.

  • 2:18

    In the next video let's see why we need backwards compatibility, and

  • 2:22

    learn how to implement a backwards compatible theme.

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