Book Image

Mastering Android Studio 3

By : Kyle Mew
Book Image

Mastering Android Studio 3

By: Kyle Mew

Overview of this book

Android Studio is an Integrated Development Environment (IDE) designed for developing Android apps. As with most development processes, Android keeps resources and logic nicely separated, and so this book covers the management of imagery and other resources, and the development and testing tools provided by the IDE. After introducing the software, the book moves straight into UI development using the sophisticated, WYSIWYG layout editor and XML code to design and test complex interfaces for a wide variety of screen configurations. With activity design covered, the book continues to guide the reader through application logic development, exploring the latest APIs provided by the SDK. Each topic will be demonstrated by working code samples that can be run on a device or emulator. One of Android Studio's greatest features is the large number of third-party plugins available for it, and throughout the book we will be exploring the most useful of these, along with samples and libraries that can be found on GitHub. The final module of the book deals with the final stages of development: building and distribution. The book concludes by taking the reader through the registration and publication processes required by Google. By the time you have finished the book, you will be able to build faster, smoother, and error-free Android applications, in less time and with fewer complications than you ever thought possible.
Table of Contents (10 chapters)

Multiple screen previewing

One of the most interesting challenges an Android developer faces is the bewildering number of devices that employ it. Everything from wristwatches to widescreen televisions. It is rare that we would want to develop a single application to run across such a range, but even developing layouts for all mobile phones is still a daunting task.

Fortunately, this process is aided by the way the SDK allows us to categorize features such as screen shape, size, and density into broader groups. Android Studio adds another powerful UI development tool, in the form of a complex preview system. This can be used to preview many popular device configurations as well as allowing us to create custom configurations.

In the previous section, we took a look at the ConstraintLayout toolbar, but as you will have noticed, there is a more generic design editor toolbar:

Design...