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

Examining the log output


In the previous chapter, we mentioned that our app was running in a debug mode so we could monitor it and get feedback when things go wrong. So, where is all this feedback then?

You might have noticed a whole load of scrolling text at the bottom of the Android Studio window. If not, click on the Android tab at the bottom-left corner of the screen and then make sure that the logcat tab is selected as well, as indicated by the areas highlighted in solid red in the next figure (the dashed red areas will be discussed in a moment):

You can drag the window to make it taller, just like you can in most other Windows applications.

This is called the logcat or sometimes, it is referred to as the console. It is our app's way of telling us what is going on underneath what the user sees. If the app crashes, the reason or clues about the reason will appear here. If we need to output debugging information, we can do so here as well.

Tip

If you just cannot work out why your app is crashing...