Book Image

Android Programming for Beginners

By : John Horton, Paresh Mayani
Book Image

Android Programming for Beginners

By: John Horton, Paresh Mayani

Overview of this book

Android is the most popular OS in the world. There are millions of devices accessing tens of thousands of applications. It is many people's entry point into the world of technology; it is an operating system for everyone. Despite this, the entry-fee to actually make Android applications is usually a computer science degree, or five years’ worth of Java experience. Android Programming for Beginners will be your companion to create Android applications from scratch—whether you’re looking to start your programming career, make an application for work, be reintroduced to mobile development, or are just looking to program for fun. We will introduce you to all the fundamental concepts of programming in an Android context, from the Java basics to working with the Android API. All examples are created from within Android Studio, the official Android development environment that helps supercharge your application development process. After this crash-course, we’ll dive deeper into Android programming and you’ll learn how to create applications with a professional-standard UI through fragments, make location-aware apps with Google Maps integration, and store your user’s data with SQLite. In addition, you’ll see how to make your apps multilingual, capture images from a device’s camera, and work with graphics, sound, and animations too. By the end of this book, you’ll be ready to start building your own custom applications in Android and Java.
Table of Contents (37 chapters)
Android Programming for Beginners
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

More advanced persistence


Let's think about what we need to do. We want to save a bunch of notes to the internal storage. Being more specific, we want to store a selection of strings and related Boolean values. These strings and Boolean values represent the user's note title, the note's text, and whether or not it is a to-do, important, or idea.

Given what we already know about the SharedPreferences class, at first glance, this might not seem especially challenging until we dig a little deeper into our requirements. What if the user loves our app and ends up with 100 notes? We would need 100 identifiers for the key-value pairs. This is not impossible but is starting to get awkward.

Now, consider that we want to enhance the note app and give the user the ability to add dates to them. Android has a Date class that is perfect for this. It would be fairly straightforward to then add neat features like reminders to our app. But when it comes to saving data, all of a sudden, things start to get...