Book Image

Android 3.0 Application Development Cookbook

By : Kyle Merrifield Mew
Book Image

Android 3.0 Application Development Cookbook

By: Kyle Merrifield Mew

Overview of this book

<p>Android is a mobile operating system that runs on a staggering number of smartphones and tablets. Android offers developers the ability to build extremely rich and innovative applications written using the Java programming language. Among the number of books that have been published on the topic, what&rsquo;s missing is a thoroughly practical, hands-on book that takes you straight to getting your job done without boring you with too much theory.<br /><br />Android 3.0 Application Development Cookbook will take you straight to the information you need to get your applications up and running. This book is written to provide you with the shortest possible route between an idea and a working application. <br /><br />Work through the book from start to finish to become an Android expert, or use it as a reference book by applying recipes directly to your project.<br /><br />This book covers every aspect of mobile app development, starting with major application components and screen layout and design, before moving on to how to manage sensors such as internal gyroscopes and near field communications. Towards the end, it delves into smartphone multimedia capabilities as well as graphics and animation, web access, and GPS. <br /><br />Whether you are writing your first app or your hundredth, this is a book that you will come back to time and time again, with its many tips and tricks on the rich features of Android 3.</p>
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Android 3.0 Application Development Cookbook
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Applying a relative layout


The RelativeLayout subclass provides a container that allows us to position views, and even other layouts, based on each others' screen locations. Like the LinearLayout that we saw in the previous section, the RelativeLayout is also a ViewGroup; but it is particularly useful for reducing the number of other ViewGroups that we may have otherwise nested within it, which in turn saves vital memory.

Getting ready

We are going to set up a single RelativeLayout that contains widgets which are aligned both horizontally and vertically.

Start up a new Android project in Eclipse.

How to do it...

  1. Open the res/layout/main.xml file with the Graphical Layout tab and delete the default TextView by selecting it and pressing Delete.

  2. Open main.xml with the main.xml tab so that you can edit the code directly, delete the line android:orientation="vertical", and change the opening and closing tag types from LinearLayout to RelativeLayout. The main.xml file should then look like this:

    &lt...