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Introducing Themes

1:28 with Michael Lustig

Styles are great, but do we have to manually apply them to each child in a layout? Of course not! We can use Themes. In this video, we introduce you to themes, briefly discuss the troubled times of old when styling your Android applications on older versions of the platform, and ease your worry by letting you know that AppCompat has your back.

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  • 0:00

    Although styles are great for

  • 0:01

    applying certain attributes to individual views, what if we wanna think bigger and

  • 0:06

    apply certain characteristics to entire parts of our application?

  • 0:09

    Do we have to manually create a style for each view and apply it one by one?

  • 0:13

    That certainly seems like a very tedious process, and

  • 0:15

    that's exactly why Android has a concept of themes.

  • 0:18

    Themes are applied globally, either to the entire application to certain activities

  • 0:23

    and now, with the release of Android Lollipop 5.0, can be applied to Views.

  • 0:28

    In this course our app only requires a very simple theme globally, and

  • 0:32

    one that's just ever slightly more complex for the settings activity.

  • 0:35

    So we'll go ahead and create that in the next video.

  • 0:37

    Although simple, themes in Android are incredibly powerful and

  • 0:40

    you'll see just how useful they are when we can do in two lines of

  • 0:43

    code what would normally have taken us as many lines as Views in our layouts.

  • 0:47

    If you're fairly new to Android you might not have experienced the mess that theming

  • 0:51

    your application used to be.

  • 0:52

    Due to the varied nature of Android, and

  • 0:54

    the fact that some users are still on much older versions, we had to back port or

  • 0:58

    create different versions of your styles that would work on different versions

  • 1:01

    of Android, depending on how far back you want it to support.

  • 1:05

    Now Android comes with a really cool library called AppCompat, so

  • 1:08

    we don't have to worry about most of that hard work.

  • 1:11

    We're going to use AppCompat soon, but

  • 1:13

    first, I wanna take advantage of the power of themes.

  • 1:16

    In the next video we're going to write four lines of code to style

  • 1:19

    the entire settings activity just the way we like.

  • 1:21

    After that we'll provide motivation for why we wanna use

  • 1:24

    the backwards compatible themes and show you how to make one yourself.

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