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

Exploring the auto-generated code and assets


In the drawable folder, there are some icons, as shown in the following screenshot:

These are the usual icons, but also the ones that appear in the menu of the navigation drawer. We will not take the trouble to change these, but if you want to personalize the icons in your app, it should be plain by the end of this exploration how to do so.

Next, open the res/menu folder. Notice that there is an extra file titled activity_main_drawer.xml. This next code is an excerpt from this file, so we can discuss its contents:

<group android:checkableBehavior="single">
   <item
         android:id="@+id/nav_camera"
         android:icon="@drawable/ic_menu_camera"
         android:title="Import" />
   <item
         android:id="@+id/nav_gallery"
         android:icon="@drawable/ic_menu_gallery"
         android:title="Gallery" />
   <item
         android:id="@+id/nav_slideshow"
         android:icon="@drawable/ic_menu_slideshow"
        ...