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Styles and Themes in Android

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Creating a Theme

2:24 with Strange Learning

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.

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    Creating a theme is an identical process to creating a style but 0:00
    don't be fooled, they're different things. 0:03
    Remember, you can think of themes as applying to each view of a layout, 0:05
    whereas the styles we're simply styling that particular view to which the style 0:09
    has been applied. 0:13
    To create a theme we actually use the style tag. 0:14
    I know that can be perhaps more than slightly confusing, 0:16
    and I would have preferred that themes be created with maybe theme tags, and 0:19
    I couldn't find any documentation to why that isn't the case but 0:23
    I'm sure there was a good reason behind that particular design decision. 0:26
    So let's create a theme called settings theme and 0:29
    set its parent to android:theme.material.noActionBar 0:33
    By setting the parent we inherit all of the attributes from that theme. 0:49
    Material design was introduced with Android 5.0 Lollipop, and 0:53
    provides developers with a great set of tools for 0:56
    creating beautiful, elegant user interfaces. 0:58
    The material theme in Android has a concept of primary colors and 1:01
    accent colors. 1:04
    That, when applied to your theme, 1:06
    will give your Views personality to match your brand. 1:08
    As you can see from the mo-cap on the left we wanna use this cool green color 1:10
    in a bunch of different views, using styles to do that would be a pain. 1:14
    Believe it or not, we can actually just write one line of code here to apply 1:18
    that color to all of the Views in our SettingsActivity. 1:21
    We'll do that now by creating a new item with the name android:colorAccent and 1:24
    setting the value to our predefined color called SettingsAccent. 1:28
    After we've created our theme, 1:36
    we need to tell Android to use it with our SettingsActivity. 1:38
    To do that I'll just add an android:theme to our SettingsActivity in the manifest 1:41
    and we'll be good to go. 1:45
    Let's run that and see what it looks like. 1:58
    I'll click through the SettingsActivity. 2:03
    Awesome, the color was applied to the entire settings screen and we only had to 2:10
    apply the style once, rather than to every single view in the SettingsActivity. 2:14
    In the next video let's see why we need backwards compatibility, and 2:18
    learn how to implement a backwards compatible theme. 2:22

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