Detecting Common Gestures on Android Using GestureDetector

Gestures are those subtle motions to trigger interactions between the touch screen and the user. It lasts for the time between the first touch on the screen to the point when the last finger leaves the surface. We’re all familiar with it as it’s the most common way to communicate with apps on our mobiles, tablets, etc. these days. Some examples are scrolling in an app by swiping vertically/horizontally, pinch to zoom, long press to select and so on.

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Using onTouchEvent() and View.OnTouchListener Interface with MotionEvent to Detect Common Gestures Like Tap and Swipes on Android

Touch gestures like tapping, swiping vertically/horizontally, panning, etc. occurs when a user places one or more fingers on the screen and by the time the last finger looses contact, the entire pattern of finger movements is interpreted as a particular gesture by your android application. First all the relevant data of touch events are gathered and then they’re interpreted to see which gestures they match and the pertaining actions are executed as specified in the code.

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Understanding GridView in Android with Custom Adapters by Building an Image Gallery

GridView is a ViewGroup just like ListView that allows us to display items in a two-dimensional scrolling grid. Just like a ListView the data into a GridView is populated by an Adapter (ListAdapter) that fetches data from various sources like an array or a database. It’s mostly used to build image, video, audio galleries.

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Understanding Android Spinners and Populating Them with (Adding) a Set of Items

Spinners in Android are like select dropdowns (HTML) of web development. Once tapped, it shows a list of options in a dropdown menu from which one can select a value. It is very simple to add it as a View in the Layout file (just as any other view like TextView or EditView):

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