Book Image

Mastering Android Application Development

By : Antonio Pachon
Book Image

Mastering Android Application Development

By: Antonio Pachon

Overview of this book

There are millions of Android apps out there for people to download – how do you make sure yours has the edge? It’s not always about innovation and ideas – the most successful apps are those that are able to satisfy customer demands – they’re the ones that look the best, the fastest, and the easiest and most intuitive to use. This book shows you how to create Android applications that do precisely that – it has been designed help you consider and answer those questions throughout the development process, so you can create applications that stand out against the crowd. Learn how to create exemplary UIs that contribute to a satisfying user experience through the lens of Material Design, and explore how to harness the range of features within the Android SDK to help you. Dive deeper into complex programming concepts and discover how to leverage concurrency and navigate memory management and image handling. You’ll also find further guidance on testing and debugging so you can guarantee that your application is reliable and robust for users. Beyond this you’ll find out how to extend your app and add greater functionality, including notifications, location services, adverts and app billing (essential if you want to properly monetize your creation!). To make sure you have confidence at every stage in the process, the book also shows you how to release your app to the Play store – to make sure your maximising your efforts to create a popular Android application!
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
Mastering Android Application Development
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Chapter 5. Lists and Grids

In this chapter, we will work with lists and grids. A list or a matrix of elements can be found in almost every app on the market. Knowing how to display a list of elements on Android is something that you learn at a basic level; however, there is a lot to expand on and understand.

It's important to know which patterns we can use here, how to recycle the view, and how to display different kinds of elements with different views in the same list.

With this in mind, we will be able to understand why RecyclerView is the successor of ListView, and we will learn how to implement a list with this component. Therefore, we will cover the following in this chapter:

  • Starting with lists

    • ListView

    • The custom adapter

    • Recycling views

    • Using the ViewHolder pattern

  • Introducing RecyclerView

    • List, grid, or stack

    • Implementation

  • OnItemClick