[QuickTips] Turning on guide lines for your Android device
Launching applications nowadays requires, among other things, excellent user experience with awesome visuals. Being a programmer not only requires taking care of making code, but also figuring out what one can do to improve those two items.
Often, it is quite difficult to check if everything fits well in the layout once the screens are built, and although the preview tools we have are good, verifying them against real devices is still the best way of feeling whether things are going in the right place or not.
On Android devices, there are a bunch of cool features in Developer Settings that help make things easier to test, and there is one cool feature that I love the most: show layout bounds.
With it, you can see plenty of guidelines showing margins, bounds, and paddings. Although the information isn’t present, the type of layout which was used can be inferred by the way things are positioned.
To enable it:
- Go to the settings menu, and scroll down to “Developer Options.”
- After accessing it scroll down to “show layout bounds” and switch it on.
- Done.
Pro tip: Don’t leave Developer Options always on, as they make the device bloody slow.
That’s all for today, see you around on the next QuickTips.
