[lnanek]

This sort of thing used to happen a lot at an Android app company I worked for. It would be easier and cleaner to implement something like a button background in XML, but it wouldn't look nearly as good as a button produced using real graphics. It wasn't just looks either, they were less usable in that case. If a button doesn't look 3D due to being limited to a simple linear gradient or something then users are less likely to click it, and we did have user testing reports of people mistaking the biggest buttons that we wanted people to click most for section titles. So even if a shadow can be pulled off, what else is missing that a raster graphics solution would include. ;/