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)

Assets and Resources

So far, in this book, we have covered layouts, design, and the libraries and tools that support them. We then went on to explore developing for different screen sizes, shapes, and densities, as well as other form factors. This is the last chapter in the UI development module where we will look at how Android Studio manages various assets and resources, such as icons and other drawables.

Android Studio is very accommodating when it comes to including drawables in our projects and, particularly, when it comes to vector graphics, which are invaluable to an Android developer, as they scale nicely across different screen sizes and densities, and this is catered for with a very valuable tool, the vector asset studio. Along with this, there is an asset studio to generate and configure bitmap images.

Vector drawables are widely used for in-app icons and in components...