Beyond the Basics of User Interfaces

In this we’ll take a deeper dive into the BlackBerry API and learn how to really control all aspects of the look and feel of your application’s UI. The topics in this will get a bit more advanced but are nothing you shouldn’t be able to handle if you’ve followed through up to this point. I’ll be up front though, and say that you’ve already learned enough to put together a user interface that could support a lot of different applications, so if you want to skip over this chapter for now and go on to learn about networking, persistence, and other services before spending time on your UI, then go ahead. Later topics don’t depend on this, so skipping it for now won’t do any harm. I highly recommend that you do come back here before finally publishing your application, as the topics we’ll cover here will go a long way toward improving the appearance and overall user experience of your application. In this we’ll take the UI Fun application that we built in the last chapter as a starting point and modify a lot of the components that make up its user interface. We’ll focus a bit on some aspects of the API that we glossed over earlier (yes, I know we did) and explore fonts, colors, and more; this will give you a feel for what can be done, but of course, as with all things in this book, you should just look at this as the beginning. When you’re done here, you’ll have the tools and knowledge to implement almost any user interface that you can imagine and design.