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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

GitHub Repo

  • 0:00

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

  • 0:03

    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.

  • 1:01

    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

  • 2:22

    learn how to implement a backwards compatible theme.

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