Using packages for themes in the FeedHenry Studio

Posted by admin on Wednesday, January 18, 2012

By Evan Shortiss, Intern, FeedHenry Ltd

Recently Google has released it’s new Android Design Guidelines. Apple also provides similar guidelines for iOS developers. These updated guidelines from Google show a strong move to emulate Apple’s success with User Interface (UI) design. It also places a new constraint on developers to ensure their app can appear as native as possible to the device it is running on. Achieving a native UI appearance is important to ensure a positive user experience and ensure that using all apps feels natural and familiar.

Developing an App that is cross platform whilst bearing these design principles in mind can be very time consuming for the developer. It can be time consuming due to differences in both the code base for the different platforms and the challenge of adhering to differing design guidelines. As well as enabling developers to overcome the challenge of differing code bases between mobile devices, the FeedHenry platform also simplifies the task of styling apps for their target platform through the use of packages. Packages are an extremely powerful and simple feature of the FeedHenry Studio and require very little time to understand and more importantly, implement.

So what are packages? Simply put a package is a folder within which a developer can store files to override default functionality or styles. As an intern of less than two weeks here at FeedHenry I’ve had the opportunity to help develop our template that demonstrates the use of packages. Getting a handle on the use of packages is made simple by exploring the Template App, “App Anatomy” in the FeedHenry Studio. By simply changing a single line of text within the Configuration section of the FeedHenry Studio it is possible to totally change the appearance of your app. The screenshot below shows the App Anatomy side by side with different packages applied to determine what style is used.

For more information on using app Anatomy take a look at the tutorial, or to get started, clone this template on GitHub.