Welcome to the Treehouse Community

Want to collaborate on code errors? Have bugs you need feedback on? Looking for an extra set of eyes on your latest project? Get support with fellow developers, designers, and programmers of all backgrounds and skill levels here with the Treehouse Community! While you're at it, check out some resources Treehouse students have shared here.

Looking to learn something new?

Treehouse offers a seven day free trial for new students. Get access to thousands of hours of content and join thousands of Treehouse students and alumni in the community today.

Start your free trial

Android

Customize design on older android versions

I would like to ask how can I customize tabs, lists, radio buttons and popups in older android versions? I succeeded to change a little bit of tabs through tabs.java and list through styles but I would like to make that look nicer, correct some padding and do that only through styles and themes.

I need to customize the app for Android 2.3.3 (API 10) and I would really like to remove those default yellow and black colors on alert box and some other things, which it seems can be removed only on API levels 11 and higher. Also I am using IntelliJ Idea editor and it needs to remain that.

Could you give me some advice how can I achieve that and what support library is the easiest and smartest to include in this case (as I suppose that is the only option)? I don’t want to touch java code. Does Holo Light or Material design allow us customize alert box also? And is it possible to achieve that on older API without messing up with the code (the code needs to remain the same)?

Thank you in advance!

Mazen Halawi
Mazen Halawi
7,806 Points

Hi, not sure why you are still developing apps for android 2.3.3 when you have less than 3% of android phones using it (http://developer.android.com/about/dashboards/index.html) but anyways... Did you try to add the AppTheme from the AppCompat 7 library to your solution? for the alert dialog, i believe you can customize it by creating your custom layout and then use the setView(resource_id) to add that view to your alertdialog. furthermore, you can create a new activity and give it a theme android:theme= "@style/Theme.AppCompat.Dialog" this way you can play it the way you want.

1 Answer

Thank you for the answer. I'll try with support 7, hope that will help.. I use old API because that is the requirement I need to respect in this case...

Bye