Recently, we at excelarz Interactive made a series of Sports Apps that enables user to follow their choice of sports in an intuitive and flexible manner. The set of applications offers its user to view news, live scores, blogs, players, schedule, draws, twitter feeds according to his choice. What we needed was to build the apps in a way as to enhance the usabilty by letting the user customize the application in a way that he choses.

For implementing the switching between selected information types (news, blogs, scores, players, twitter, schedule etc), we first looked into the native tab control of Android. After digging enough, we concluded that the tab control would not help us accomplish this variable nature that we required from it due to its rigid set of options and properties.

We then came up with the idea of using the Gallery view for achieving this functionality. What we do is we make some images for each of the tab that we require to have in our application. Then a simple adapter is created (which is required to populate the gallery dynamically) and pass on the list of selected tabs to the adapter. The adapter then creates the view as per the selection made by the user. This way we managed to acheive a sliding choice bar for selection of different info type.

See the tab bar in action the the following video.

This approach may definity not the ideal one in this scenario but we did achieve what we wanted to do. Any suggestion on improvements and alternative is more than welcome.