Introducing Themes

Although styles are great for 0:00 applying certain attributes to individual views, what if we wanna think bigger and 0:01 apply certain characteristics to entire parts of our application? 0:06 Do we have to manually create a style for each view and apply it one by one? 0:09 That certainly seems like a very tedious process, and 0:13 that's exactly why Android has a concept of themes. 0:15 Themes are applied globally, either to the entire application to certain activities 0:18 and now, with the release of Android Lollipop 5.0, can be applied to Views. 0:23 In this course our app only requires a very simple theme globally, and 0:28 one that's just ever slightly more complex for the settings activity. 0:32 So we'll go ahead and create that in the next video. 0:35 Although simple, themes in Android are incredibly powerful and 0:37 you'll see just how useful they are when we can do in two lines of 0:40 code what would normally have taken us as many lines as Views in our layouts. 0:43 If you're fairly new to Android you might not have experienced the mess that theming 0:47 your application used to be. 0:51 Due to the varied nature of Android, and 0:52 the fact that some users are still on much older versions, we had to back port or 0:54 create different versions of your styles that would work on different versions 0:58 of Android, depending on how far back you want it to support. 1:01 Now Android comes with a really cool library called AppCompat, so 1:05 we don't have to worry about most of that hard work. 1:08 We're going to use AppCompat soon, but 1:11 first, I wanna take advantage of the power of themes. 1:13 In the next video we're going to write four lines of code to style 1:16 the entire settings activity just the way we like. 1:19 After that we'll provide motivation for why we wanna use 1:21 the backwards compatible themes and show you how to make one yourself. 1:24