Apps How to make developing easier when designing?

[mags1754]

I have a question: My developer does math for matching dimensions between the screens I (the designer) give and the layout she makes. There is a formula for it, but she forgets after a project is over and she has to start all over again. Is there anything I can do as a designer to minimize her head banging hours. Is there a certain formula or layout I should design around to make things a bit easier for her. Thank you to anyone who responds it is greatly appreciated.

 

[jonbonazza]

If you are manually calculating the proper dimensions, you are doing it wrong. Android provides some very good mechanism to allow for device independant layouts, including dynamic layouts, device independent pixels, an dynamic asset utilization.

Take a look at this:
Supporting Multiple Screens | Android Developers

 

[mags1754]

Problem in short is,

1) When we design screens, should we design for a specific screen size and screen density?

2) How to match all the units from photoshop to layout xmls? - Points/pixels in photoshop should be matched to sp(font sizes) and dip(for other dimensions).

 

[jonbonazza]

Well, you will need to start somewhere, right? The way we do it, we normally just pick our favorite tester and treat it as the "target" screen size. This is generally the largest device we have, as scaling down is much "cleaner" than scaling up, but this isn't really a necessity.

Unfortunately, I don't have an answer to this question. According to this thread on stack overflow, it's possible to do the conversion programaticaly, but you shouldn't really be doing any UI development programatically, as mentioned before. The only thing I can suggest, is to, again, pick a target screen size, design your UI in PS using this target screen size as a base and then use trial and error to place/size your components via XML in an attempt to get them as close to the original design as possible.

 

[Kirumbik]

Problem in short is,

1) When we design screens, should we design for a specific screen size and screen density?

2) How to match all the units from photoshop to layout xmls? - Points/pixels in photoshop should be matched to sp(font sizes) and dip(for other dimensions).

In our project we use next approach - design in photoshop for mdpi screen, so every pixel in ps = 1dp in android layout. and then we've resized all graphics for other screens (ldpi/hdpi/xhdpi) using special script