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SettingActivity was already using an AppCompat theme and extending AppCompatActivity, so why does it still look different? We'll answer that question and talk about a little bit of the magic of AppCompatActivity, ultimately finishing the styling of the app on older platforms.
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- Course files (zip download)
- End of Stage 2 Video 5 (GitHub repo)
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But wait, why does the settings
activity still have those switches that
0:00
look really dated?
0:03
It already extends from
AppCompat activity.
0:04
Well, it turns out that under
the covers AppCompat is doing a lot of
0:07
the work for us.
0:10
For example, when ever we use a seek bar,
an edit text or a number of other views
0:10
from the platform AppCompat will switch
them out for the compatible version of
0:14
that same view, automatically
giving us backward compatibility.
0:18
However, it doesn't do so
for the switch widget.
0:23
I've included links to the documentation
on each of those views in the teacher's
0:25
notes, if you'd like
a little more information.
0:28
Luckily, we can manually replace
the Android.Widget.Switch with
0:30
the Android.Support.V7.Widget.Switch
compat view in our layout manually,
0:34
and everything should look consistent.
0:39
Let's do that now and
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run the app again to take one final
peek at the settings activity.
0:42
And great it now looks and feels just like
the app running on the newer version.
1:07
And we have achieved backgrounds
compatibility with our layout.
1:11
However our boss is incredibly picky and
notices a wierd flashing effect on some
1:14
of buttons on switches when clicked
on older versions of Android.
1:18
In order to resolve this issue
of the flashing buttons,
1:22
we are going to have to create a minutely
different version of the style applied
1:25
to each button experiencing the issue.
1:29
In our case we've got the overflow
button in the song playback activity,
1:31
the playback button's themselves, and
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lastly the switches in
the settings activity.
1:37
First, we'll fix the overflow
button in the playback activity.
1:39
To do so we use the cool trick for
extracting a style for that button and
1:43
add some attributes that
weren't automatically grabbed
1:47
by the refactoring tool and
name it overflow button base.
1:50
We'll be sure to exclude the background
attribute from the base,
2:26
since we only want the
selectableItemBackgroundBorderless to be
2:29
applied in versions of Android 21 and up.
2:32
Next, we'll create a version of styles.xml
that will only be used in those versions
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of Android greater than 21.
2:41
Within that new styles file, we'll create
the overflow button style that will
2:50
actually be applied at run time
to run newer versions of Android.
2:54
Within that style we just have to set the
background to selectable item background
3:17
borderless.
3:21
We'll copy that style into
our other styles.xml and
3:23
set the background to transparent.
3:26
If we didn't set it to transparent and
just left the background blank,
3:28
the background of the button
would block what's behind it.
3:31
Now I'm going to do the same thing for
our playback button style.
3:34
I'm going to do it
a slightly different way so
3:37
you can see different methods
of achieving the same goal.
3:39
This time I'll set the default
back ground to transparent and
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only apply the clickable background
on Android 21 and greater.
3:44
You'll notice that since I don't have
to override any default attributes of
3:59
the style, I can simply close the style
tag after declaring the parent.
4:03
Now, I'll create the style
in the V21 styles file and
4:07
verify that everything looks and
works as expected.
4:09
Before running the App, I need to go
back to activities on song playback.
4:46
And change style applied
to the overflow button,
4:50
to the actually style we want to use.
4:52
Not the the base style that we named,
when extracting all the attributes.
4:54
Lastly, I'll take care of this setting
switch style in the same way as
5:10
I did the playback button style.
5:14
Finally, we'll run the app and
make sure everything looks great.
6:04
That looks good.
6:19
We don't really have a visual effect here,
but
6:22
at least we got rid of the flashing
effect that we were going for.
6:24
And those switches look good.
6:27
Fantastic, it looks like we successfully
back ported our apps design.
6:32
I can't wait to show management.
6:35
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