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

Handling touches


To get started with screen interaction, add the OnTouchEvent function to the LiveDrawingView class as follows:

override fun onTouchEvent(
   motionEvent: MotionEvent): Boolean {
  
   return true
}

This is an overridden function, and it is called by Android every time the user interacts with the screen. Look at the one and only parameter of onTouchEvent.

It turns out that motionEvent has a whole bunch of data tucked away inside it, and this data contains the details of the touch that just occurred. The operating system sent it to us because it knows we will probably need some of it.

Note that I said some of it. The MotionEvent class is quite extensive; it contains within it dozens of functions and properties.

For now, all we need to know is that the screen responds at the precise moment that the player's finger moves, touches the screen, or is removed.

Some of the variables and functions contained within motionEvent that we will use include the following:

  • The action property...