Showing icons on vertical alignment We learned BrowseFragment to show icons, where icons are aligned horizontally when the size increases. VerticalGridFragment is another Fragment provided by leanback support library, where it shows the icons with vertical alignment.   For example, I guess Sideload Launcher – Android TV is using this VerticalGridFragment to show installed app icons.  This post explains how to implement VerticalGridFragment. The implementation is referenced from Google’s sample implementation in the same way as before. Create parent Activity – VerticalGridActivity Starting by creating Activity. right click on “ui” package, [New] → [Activity] → [Blank Activity], type Activity Name as “VerticalGridActivity” and click [Finish]. It will automatically create VerticalGridActivity class, activity_vertical_grid.xml layout resource and add this […]

More customization of BrowseFragment – Multiple rows icon alignment on ListRow Continuing from the previous chapter, BrowseFragment Header customization, I proceed to customizing ListRow. Chapter 17: Customizing Header Chapter 18: Customizing ListRow (we are here!) Leanback Launcher app shows multiple rows in Apps, Games bar if the number of icon is many (2 rows are used for “Apps” category in above picture). But original ListRow provided by Leanback support library only allows to show contents in one line. In this chapter, goal is to allow ListRow to show multiple rows in each header, by making customized class of ListRow (Model) and ListRowPresenter (Presenter). Explanation: Dig in source code  ListRow (Model), ListRowView (View), ListRowPresenter (Presenter) is used for […]

More customization of BrowseFragment – Showing icon beside the Header title The basic implementation of BrowseFragment is already explained in this tutorial. I’m going to proceed some advanced customization in following chapters. Chapter 17: Customizing Header (we are here!) Chapter 18: Customizing ListRow Aim is to change the design of header, to show icons on the left of header title text, as shown in the above image. How to customize header design Leanback support library adopts MVP (Model-View-Presenter) architecture*, and HeaderItem (Model) is not an exception. We can prepare our own View and Presenter to customize the design of header. * MVP is explained in Chapter 14.  Step is as follows, Make own Model (If necessary): Java class which […]

Background data loading using Loader class This Tutorial was explaining about Leanback support library, which is usually used to show list of contents information. So developers may want to load a many meta data to show contents. When Activity or Fragment need to prepare big size of data, it is better to load the data in background. For this purpose, we can use Loader and LoaderManager. They are useful to implement background data loading followed by updating UI based on these loaded data. I’m going to implement this Loader in this chapter. To study about Loader, I found a very nice article to understand Loader and the LoaderManager in detail (from part 1 to part 4). This post is […]

  * You can see the JSON video data used in this post at here: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/corochann/AndroidTVappTutorial/master/app/src/main/assets/video_lists.json  Manage data online, keep updated. In the previous chapter, Background data loading – Android TV application hands on tutorial 15, I introduced LoaderManager and Loader class which helps to load/prepare (maybe time consuming) data in background. One of the example of “time consuming” data preparation is loading data from network. If you can provide the data from the web, app can always show updated, latest information. In this chapter I will implement web data loading, to show our video contents information. We will prepare data in json format, and upload it to the web (https://raw.githubusercontent.com/corochann/AndroidTVappTutorial/master/app/src/main/assets/video_lists.json for now). It […]