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)

General drawables

We saw earlier how to convert a black icon into a color to match our app or current activity using tinting. With other images, there are times when they take up a considerable amount of the screen, and we want to apply the reverse and have our icons colored so that they match our graphics. Fortunately, Android provides a support library to extract prominent and dominant colors from any bitmap.

The palette library

Applying our own themes to our apps can produce very stylish-looking interfaces, especially when we are dealing with text, icons, and images we created ourselves to suit the app. Many apps incorporate the user's own images and, in these cases, there is no way of knowing in advance how to select...