Book Image

Android Programming with Kotlin for Beginners

By : John Horton
5 (1)
Book Image

Android Programming with Kotlin for Beginners

5 (1)
By: John Horton

Overview of this book

Android is the most popular mobile operating system in the world and Kotlin has been declared by Google as a first-class programming language to build Android apps. With the imminent arrival of the most anticipated Android update, Android 10 (Q), this book gets you started building apps compatible with the latest version of Android. It adopts a project-style approach, where we focus on teaching the fundamentals of Android app development and the essentials of Kotlin by building three real-world apps and more than a dozen mini-apps. The book begins by giving you a strong grasp of how Kotlin and Android work together before gradually moving onto exploring the various Android APIs for building stunning apps for Android with ease. You will learn to make your apps more presentable using different layouts. You will dive deep into Kotlin programming concepts such as variables, functions, data structures, Object-Oriented code, and how to connect your Kotlin code to the UI. You will learn to add multilingual text so that your app is accessible to millions of more potential users. You will learn how animation, graphics, and sound effects work and are implemented in your Android app. By the end of the book, you will have sound knowledge about significant Kotlin programming concepts and start building your own fully featured Android apps.
Table of Contents (33 chapters)
Android Programming with Kotlin for Beginners
Contributors
Preface
Index

Chapter 13. Bringing Android Widgets to Life

Now that we have a good overview of both the layout and coding of an Android app, as well as our newly acquired insight into object-oriented programming (OOP) and how we can manipulate the UI from our Kotlin code, we are ready to experiment with more widgets from the Android Studio palette.

At times, OOP is a tricky thing, and this chapter introduces some topics that can be awkward for beginners. However, by gradually learning these new concepts and practicing them repeatedly, they will, over time, become our friend.

In this chapter, we will diversify a lot by going back to the Android Studio palette and looking at half a dozen widgets that we have either not seen at all or have not used fully yet.

Once we have done so, we will put them all into a layout and practice manipulating them with our Kotlin code.

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

  • Refresh our memories on declaring and initializing layout widgets

  • See how to create widgets...