The Android UI has come up a long way over the years. Specially with the release of the Holo themes, a bully number of widgets that previously felt clunky and dated all of a sudden became streamlined and sexy.

However, one case where I did not totally agree with the direction Google chose to have the UI in is that of the EditText widget. While I agree when editing a unmarried line of text the Holo-themed EditText widget is a great utilise of screen real estate, when the component is gear up to multi-line, I retrieve it fails to inkling the user in.

To see what I mean, let's take a look at a standard EditText xml layout.

I'm giving the user eight lines of text to play with, and when the widget is rendered on Éclair (API 10), that's pretty obvious (Figure A).

Figure A

Run that aforementioned code on Honeycomb (API eleven) or amend though, and it'southward not as clear (Figure B).

Figure B

Who knows, perchance I just think better inside the box (get information technology?), only except for the awful orange I preferred the pre-Holo wait for the EditText view.

Luckily, there are a couple of quick, painless means to add together bounding to a multi-line EditText widget. The first is as easy as setting the background color and calculation a chip of padding (Figure C).

Figure C

If you desire something a little fancier, try creating a simple XML shape in your /drawable folder.

And so point your EditText background to your drawable (Figure D).

Effigy D

At the cease of the mean solar day, the Android platform gives developers guidance and freedom, and the UI widgets are no exception. If you find the cues provided by the out-of-the-box elements are leaving your users scratching their heads, past all means don't be afraid to experiment. Subtle tweaks are often all that are required and, as you can come across from the examples above, the try is pretty minimal.