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

Chapter 28. Threads, Touches, Drawing, and a Simple Game

So far throughout the book, we have concentrated on using the diverse range of UI widgets provided by the Android API. In conventional apps, this is almost always the best way to do things.

For example, why would we want to reinvent a widget that has been designed and refined by experts?

Lots of Android apps, however, are not based on this conventional appearance. Think of the multitude of kids' or artists' drawing apps. And what about the best selling category on Google Play: games?

In this chapter, we will look at and play with the skills and Android classes that are needed to build apps of this type. The topics for this chapter are:

  • Threads: How to run more than one block of code simultaneously

  • Drawing: How we use the Canvas and Paint classes for pixels, lines, shapes, and custom text, including a mini app

  • Screen touches: Detecting and responding to screen touches that are not on a UI widget

  • Pong: Combining the first three things to...