Q: managing Persistent Visual Data (event driven buttons and ImageViews) throughout Activities of an application I need some advice for those who are experienced making Android applications.  What I would really like to have, for my application's appearance: at the top, a title-bar which is a ImageView (content is a png), and at the bottom a series of custom buttons which make up a tab-bar like thing.  In between the title and the tab-bar is the Content, which may be anything...  (most likely buttons)
I have been doing this by making a RelativeLayout which specifies LeftMargin and UpperMargin for x,y coordinates--
Currently all of my activities are inheriting a custom MyActivity class, which rebuilds the title and the tab-bar at the time of onCreate.  This seems bad to me!
PART1)
---A solution to Persistent data
Since the "tab-bar" and the title are persistent no matter what screen you're on during this application's run-time, it makes the most sense to store them somewhere...  How should I do this? Make a singleton object that the Activity's ask for?
   I thought a little about the singleton object, and I'm not even sure what I would store, since the Views that are on displayed during Activity A have activity A as context, and not Activity B.
PART2)
---Animation Aesthetics
I would really like to have the "Content" (the view in the middle between title and tabbar) slide out to the left, and the new content slide in from the right.  I.e, I'd like the tab-bar and the title to remain fixed while the "activities" change.  is this at all possible?  What should I do to achieve it?
one idea I had, was to make all of the program in one activity!  I would create an animation for the Custom View in the middle, and I would override the "back" button to navigate correctly to the previous Custom View.  Is that a horrible idea?
Anyone have any advice?

A: Read http://developer.android.com/design.  Most of the design principles can be applied to apps that run on legacy releases; it's not just limited to Honeycomb and Ice Cream Sandwich.  Do consider the Action Bar and Dashboard design patterns.
I don't really recommend using just one Activity -- generally, an Activity should be a separate, encapsulated, pretty well defined chunk of functionality that can execute independently of other Activities.
To avoid duplication of your UI, consider reusing XML layouts.  
To avoid duplication of your logic, consider using Fragments.  You should be able to mix and match them in your activities.
To achieve the animation you describe, consider implementing a ViewPager.
Using the ActionBarCompat sample app and Android Support Library, you can enjoy modern goodies like Action Bar, fragments, tabs, and horizontal sliding transitions on devices running Android all the way back to Donut (1.6).
