Developing Android Applications with Adobe AIR

Chapter 18. Asset Management

Good design is obvious. Great design is transparent.

—Joe Sparano

Preparing and managing art in mobile development requires a close collaboration between the designer and the developer.

In addition to planning ahead for multiple screens, good design needs to conform to acceptable performance. Some of the work takes place in the preparation, but a lot needs to happen during development.

In this chapter, we will cover some aspects of design, from preparation to management at runtime.

Text

Text should be a particular concern. The absence of a physical keyboard introduces a new interface and user experience. Embedding and rendering fonts affects size and performance.

The Virtual Keyboard

On most devices, pressing on an input text field brings up the virtual keyboard. AIR for Android only uses the Android default alphabet keyboard.

Be aware of the space the keyboard occupies. The stage position is automatically adjusted to keep the text field visible. If the text field is toward the bottom, the application moves the stage up. To dismiss the virtual keyboard, the user usually needs to tap on the stage. Make sure you leave a noninteractive area for the user to tap on.

If you want to overwrite the default behavior, set the softKeyboardBehavior tag of the application descriptor to none.

<softKeyboardBehavior>none</softKeyboardBehavior>

To control how the application moves, set a listener on the softKeyboardActivating event, which is dispatched when the keyboard opens. Use ...