Book Image

Android 3.0 Application Development Cookbook

By : Kyle Merrifield Mew
Book Image

Android 3.0 Application Development Cookbook

By: Kyle Merrifield Mew

Overview of this book

<p>Android is a mobile operating system that runs on a staggering number of smartphones and tablets. Android offers developers the ability to build extremely rich and innovative applications written using the Java programming language. Among the number of books that have been published on the topic, what&rsquo;s missing is a thoroughly practical, hands-on book that takes you straight to getting your job done without boring you with too much theory.<br /><br />Android 3.0 Application Development Cookbook will take you straight to the information you need to get your applications up and running. This book is written to provide you with the shortest possible route between an idea and a working application. <br /><br />Work through the book from start to finish to become an Android expert, or use it as a reference book by applying recipes directly to your project.<br /><br />This book covers every aspect of mobile app development, starting with major application components and screen layout and design, before moving on to how to manage sensors such as internal gyroscopes and near field communications. Towards the end, it delves into smartphone multimedia capabilities as well as graphics and animation, web access, and GPS. <br /><br />Whether you are writing your first app or your hundredth, this is a book that you will come back to time and time again, with its many tips and tricks on the rich features of Android 3.</p>
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Android 3.0 Application Development Cookbook
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Applying gravity and weight


Android provides some useful formatting tools when it comes to fine tuning our screen designs, including a way to specify relative size priorities for individual views and view groups. When one considers the wide variety of screen sizes and aspects that our application may end up running on, it is essential to be able to have a generalized control over the screen.

Getting ready

Start up a new Android project in Eclipse and from the res/layout/main.xml Graphical Layout tab, drag three TextViews onto the form, one beneath another. Also delete the default TextView.

How to do it...

  1. From the Graphical Layout view change the layout width and height of the one at the bottom to MATCH_PARENT in both cases. This is easily achieved without having to edit the XML directly by right-clicking on the widget and selecting Layout Height and Layout Width from the pop-up menu.

  2. Change the layout height of the middle TextView to MATCH_PARENT in the same way.

  3. Finally, change the layout height...