Book Image

Kotlin Programming By Example

By : Iyanu Adelekan
Book Image

Kotlin Programming By Example

By: Iyanu Adelekan

Overview of this book

Kotlin greatly reduces the verbosity of source code. With Google having announced their support for Kotlin as a first-class language for writing Android apps, now's the time learn how to create apps from scratch with Kotlin Kotlin Programming By Example takes you through the building blocks of Kotlin, such as functions and classes. You’ll explore various features of Kotlin by building three applications of varying complexity. For a quick start to Android development, we look at building a classic game, Tetris, and elaborate on object-oriented programming in Kotlin. Our next application will be a messenger app, a level up in terms of complexity. Before moving onto the third app, we take a look at data persistent methods, helping us learn about the storage and retrieval of useful applications. Our final app is a place reviewer: a web application that will make use of the Google Maps API and Place Picker. By the end of this book, you will have gained experience of of creating and deploying Android applications using Kotlin.
Table of Contents (12 chapters)

Creating the user interface

As previously mentioned, the user interface is the means by which the user of an application interacts with the app. It cannot be overstated how important the user interface of an application is. Before embarking on the process of actually coding a user interface, it may be helpful to make a graphical representation of the UI to be implemented. This can be done with different tools, such as Photoshop, but for this case, a simple sketch is sufficient:

From the preceding sketch, we can see that we will need two distinct screens in this application: the landing screen and the game screen where the actual gameplay will happen. These two screens will require two separate activities. We'll call these two activities MainActivity and GameActivity.

MainActivity will serve as the entry point of our application. It will contain the user interface and all...