android:layout_weight

When building a layout, the biggest thing that keeps going through my mind is “how do I get this object to lay itself out so it consumes only what is left in a linear layout flow?”

And the answer to that is android:layout_weight.

If you specify a layout and you want one of the controls to land at the bottom of the screen with a fixed height, then the other control in the LinearLayout should be set with height “match_parent”, and weight set to 1. This causes it to consume the rest of the space. (Bonus: you can split the view by having multiple controls with different weights, and you can even achieve an effect such as one control taking a third and the other two thirds, by using appropriate weights.)

android:gravity

It’s the other one I keep forgetting about. It allows you to center something on the screen, or flush it to the right, or whatever. Apply to the view to control it’s positioning inside the container parent.

I also have some code lying around here which helps to control multiple activities where a single activity would normally live, that I cobbled together by reading this post; he goes into how to extend an ActivityGroup to achieve multiple activities within the same tab group item. I think this principle can be extended to support other interesting effects, such as having a list view where each row in the list is it’s own activity. But that’s something I need to plug away at to see if I can make it work.