Tips & tricks android developer should know - part 4

Description: In this post I'm gonna show you some interesting tools from android studio we developers use.

Also check out Part 1,Part 2  and  Part 3.


So let's get started.

1. Layout Inspector: Layout Inspector is an interesting tool to help track view and their respective properties. It contains-

•    View Tree - contains the hierarchy of the android widgets displaying the full nesting of views.
•    Properties Table - contains the properties attached to respective view. e.g:layouts/methods/padding and many more.

 a) How to enable it?

        Goto Tools -> Android -> Layout Inspector fig.1 

     

fig.1 Layout Inspector

 Note: Make sure you have android process running for your app and you have active window present to take the screenshot.

 b) How to understand it?(fig.2)

    Left
       - 'View Tree' showing full hierarchy of the screen.
   Center
     - Screenshot of the active window       
   Right
      - 'Properties Table' for each view.

  View Click
    - Properties of the widgets get updated on the right pane i.e 'Properties Table.' and get high Lighted  on the screenshot screen.

fig.2 Layout Inspector

fig.3 Layout Inspector with Properties

RecyclerView:

<RelativeLayout xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android"
    xmlns:tools="http://schemas.android.com/tools"
    android:layout_width="match_parent"
    android:layout_height="match_parent"
    android:paddingLeft="@dimen/activity_horizontal_margin"
    android:paddingRight="@dimen/activity_horizontal_margin"
    android:paddingTop="@dimen/activity_vertical_margin"
    android:paddingBottom="@dimen/activity_vertical_margin"
    tools:context=".MainActivity">
    <android.support.v7.widget.RecyclerView
        android:id="@+id/percentList"
        android:layout_width="match_parent"
        android:layout_height="match_parent"
        />
</RelativeLayout>

RecyclerView Item:

<android.support.percent.PercentRelativeLayout
   xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android"
    xmlns:app="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res-auto"
    android:layout_width="match_parent"
    android:layout_height="match_parent">
    <TextView
        android:id="@+id/fifty_huntv"
        android:background="#ff7acfff"
        android:text="20% - 50%"
        android:textColor="@android:color/white"
        style="@style/STYLE_PERCENT_TV"
        app:layout_heightPercent="20%"
        app:layout_widthPercent="50%" />
    <TextView
        android:layout_toRightOf="@id/fifty_huntv"
        android:background="#ffff5566"
        android:text="80%-50%"
        style="@style/STYLE_PERCENT_TV"
        app:layout_heightPercent="80%"
        app:layout_widthPercent="50%" />


</android.support.percent.PercentRelativeLayout>

Its an amazing tool to analyse the screen UI for the developers with all the information available on single click. Simply great.

2. How to change DPI of Phone using ADB?

Many times in our development phase we want to check the look of android UI on low/high end devices. Changing the DPI could come handy in such cases.

So let get started.

Steps 1: Find out your phones dpi using below command of adb shell. Search for 'mBaseDisplayInfo='. And then search for density within it.Save it for future to revert our dpi

adb shell dumpsys display

Steps 2: Search for 'mBaseDisplayInfo' and 'density' as show in fig.4

fig.4 Display Density

Step 3: Finally enter below adb command to change the dpi. (fig.5) with 200dpi,420dpi and 600dpi respectively

adb shell wm density 150

 


Note: If the changes do not reflect you can also try:

adb shell wm density 150 && adb reboot

Thats it, the screen will be reloaded and icons sizes will change to withstand with the density specified in the command.

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