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Comment by taspeotis | Hacker News Reader

Granted I'm a developer who's just starting out with Android, but for the life of me I can't figure out any reasonable way to position things with percentages and maximum widths. I tried weight_sum and weight and gravity=center and that gets me percentages but then maxWidth is ignored.

Most of the advice online seems to be "you must construct additional LinearLayouts".

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I've been writing Android code for close to 3 years now and I can tell you the problem isn't you. Android layouts are like CSS in that eventually they warp your brain to the point where you can mostly understand them and be productive with them, but they are still kind of ridiculous and make doing things that should be relatively easy much harder than they ought to be.

Sadly the whole way the layout system works seeps into the programmatic APIs in all sorts of bad ways too -- like, I just want to set the width of this view... there's no setWidth, wtf? Oh... LayoutParams? What in the hell is all this. Not to mention things like every layout type having its own LayoutParams class and all the fun that comes along with changing say a RelativeLayout to a LinearLayout and then having to both change all your different dpi xml files to match (especially on tablet/phone hybrid apps), and also make a ton of code changes to correct your Java casting, etc. bleh.

Really? I picked up CSS in a few hours but I still can't begin to wrap my head around how to properly work with Android layouts.

I really wish Google would let people use HTML and CSS instead of that bizarre relational XML stuff.

WebView is your friend.

That can quickly turn into "now you have two problems."

PhoneGap is exactly that, with the bonus that's it's also cross platform.

http://phonegap.com/

I've been there. I even started one small isolated project with the experimental idea to completely forego the XML layouts and just build the entire thing in Java.

Embarrassingly, it actually worked out okay. The thing is, with XML layouts, eventually the functionality requirements force you to pull in nearly all the views in Java and set styles and behavior programmatically. It's not exactly pleasant to do everything in Java (especially things like RelativeLayout.LayoutParams), but you're going to have to do it anyway, so the only thing the XML layouts really save you is setting up the view hierarchy. Perhaps if I worked with a designer who created the XML layouts and styles, this wouldn't be the case, but the Android tools for designers seem laughably bad.

And this is where a seasoned developer is required to implement good design on Android: you'll want to write a custom ViewGroup to layout child views the way that you want, without nesting layouts and causing overdraw or slow rendering.

I tried to do Android development and threw in the towel.

But picked it up again later using Xamarin Studio. Much nicer experience and easier to make a nice design.

I managed to make a small app and have it run on my iPhone and Windows Phone, and my flatmates Android.

Lots of fun, just lacking ideas to make a real world app now :(

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