Book Image

Android Application Development Cookbook - Second Edition

By : Kyle Mew
Book Image

Android Application Development Cookbook - Second Edition

By: Kyle Mew

Overview of this book

The Android OS has the largest installation base of any operating system in the world; there has never been a better time to learn Android development to write your own applications, or to make your own contributions to the open source community! This “cookbook” will make it easy for you to jump to a topic of interest and get what you need to implement the feature in your own application. If you are new to Android and learn best by “doing,” then this book will provide many topics of interest. Starting with the basics of Android development, we move on to more advanced concepts, and we’ll guide you through common tasks developers struggle to solve. The first few chapters cover the basics including Activities, Layouts, Widgets, and the Menu. From there, we cover fragments and data storage (including SQLite), device sensors, the camera, and GPS. Then we move on more advanced topics such as graphics and animation (including OpenGL), multi-threading with AsyncTask, and Internet functionality with Volley. We’ll also demonstrate Google Maps and Google Cloud Messaging (also known as Push Notifications) using the Google API Library. Finally, we’ll take a look at several online services designed especially for Android development. Take your application big-time with full Internet web services without having to become a server admin by leveraging the power of Backend as a Service (BaaS) providers.
Table of Contents (23 chapters)
Android Application Development Cookbook Second Edition
Credits
Disclaimer
About the Authors
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Introduction


Location awareness offers many benefits to an app, so many in fact that even desktop apps now attempt to get the user's location. Location uses ranges from turn-by-turn directions, "find the nearest" applications, alerts based on location, and there are now even location-based games that get you out exploring with your device.

The Google APIs offer many rich features for creating location-aware applications and mapping features. Our first recipe How to get the last location will look at obtaining the last known location as stored on the device. If your app is not location intensive, this may provide an ideal way to get the user's location without a large resource overhead. If you need constant updates, then turn to the How to receive location updates recipe. Though constant location updates requires more resources, users are likely to understand when you're giving them turn-by-turn directions. If you are requesting location updates for a proximity location, take a look at using...