suclike

<style name="Theme">
        <item name="colorForeground">@android:color/bright_foreground_dark</item>
        <item name="colorForegroundInverse">@android:color/bright_foreground_dark_inverse</item>
        <item name="colorBackground">@android:color/background_dark</item>
        <item name="colorBackgroundCacheHint">?android:attr/colorBackground</item>
        <item name="disabledAlpha">0.5</item>
        <item name="backgroundDimAmount">0.6</item>
 
        <!-- Text styles -->
        <item name="textAppearance">@android:style/TextAppearance</item>

suclike

AppCompat-v7:21 provides a very useful way of dealing with pressed/focused/activated states maintaining backwards compatibility downto API-7, but there's a small issue (big for some) with the default selectableItemBackground: It uses some PNGs and/or default values for API<21.

The main reason is that android drawable resource definitions (prior API 21) CANNOT use theme attributes at all, so there's no way of making something like:
<shape android:shape="rectangle">
        <solid android:color="?attr/colorControlHighlight" />
</shape>

For this, I've put this simple mockup on how to give your app better drawables that the appcompat defaults.

suclike

How to create custom button styles using Android's AppCompat-v7:21

Introduction

AppCompat is an Android support library to provide backwards-compatible functionality for Material design patterns. It currently comes bundled with a set of styles in the Theme.AppCompat and Widget.AppCompat namespaces. However, there is a critical component missing which I would have thought essential to provide the a default from which we could inherit our styles: Widget.AppCompat.Button. Sure, there's Widget.AppCompat.Light.ActionButton, but that doesn't actually inherit from Widget.ActionButton, which does not inherit from Widget.Button, so we might get some unexpected behavior using that as our base button style, mainly because Widget.ActionButton strictly belongs in the ActionBar.

So, if we want to have a decently normal default button style related to AppCompat, we need to make it ourselves. Let's start by digging into the Android SDK to see how it's doing default styles.

Digging In

suclike

/**
 * Align image to bottom, fill width. and crop top if needed.
 *
 * http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6330084/imageview-scaling-top-crop
 * https://gist.github.com/arriolac/3843346
 */
import android.content.Context;
import android.graphics.Matrix;
import android.util.AttributeSet;
import android.widget.ImageView;

suclike

/*******************************************************************************
 * Copyright (c) 2013,2014 Rüdiger Herrmann
 * All rights reserved. This program and the accompanying materials
 * are made available under the terms of the Eclipse Public License v1.0
 * which accompanies this distribution, and is available at
 * http://www.eclipse.org/legal/epl-v10.html
 *
 * Contributors:
 *   Rüdiger Herrmann - initial API and implementation
 *   Matt Morrissette - allow to use non-static inner IgnoreConditions

suclike

/*******************************************************************************
 * Copyright (c) 2013 Rüdiger Herrmann
 * All rights reserved. This program and the accompanying materials
 * are made available under the terms of the Eclipse Public License v1.0
 * which accompanies this distribution, and is available at
 * http://www.eclipse.org/legal/epl-v10.html
 *
 * Contributors:
 *   Rüdiger Herrmann - initial API and implementation
 ******************************************************************************/

suclike

// Top-level build file where you can add configuration options common to all sub-projects/modules.
 
buildscript {
    repositories {
        mavenCentral()
        jcenter()
        maven {
            url "https://oss.sonatype.org/content/repositories/snapshots"
        }
    }

suclike

Since this is on Hacker News and reddit...

• No, I don't distribute my résumé like this. A friend of mine made a joke about me being the kind of person who would do this, so I did (the link on that page was added later). My actual résumé is written in BSD mandoc.
• I apologize for the use of _t in my types. I spend a lot of time at a level where I can do that; "reserved for system libraries? I am the system libraries".
• Since people kept complaining, I've fixed the assignments of string literals to non-const char *s.
• My use of type * name, however, is entirely intentional.
• If you're using an older compiler, you might have trouble with the anonymous unions and the designated initializers - I think gcc 4.4 requires some extra braces to get them working together. Anything reasonably recent should work fine. Clang and gcc (newer than 4.4, at

suclike

package com.emil.android.util;

import android.content.Context;
import android.net.ConnectivityManager;
import android.net.NetworkInfo;
import android.telephony.TelephonyManager;

/**
 * Check device's network connectivity and speed 
 * @author emil http://stackoverflow.com/users/220710/emil

suclike

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<!-- This file should be outside of release manifest (in this case app/src/mock/Manifest.xml -->
<manifest
  xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android"
  package="com.example.tests">
  
  <!-- For espresso testing purposes, this is removed in live builds, but not in dev builds -->
  <uses-permission android:name="android.permission.SET_ANIMATION_SCALE" />
  <uses-permission android:name="android.permission.DISABLE_KEYGUARD" />
  <uses-permission android:name="android.permission.WAKE_LOCK" />