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

Introduction


As the computing power of mobile devices has increased, so has their ability to play and record a variety of media such as audio and video. Android provides some useful tools for managing multimedia.

Very few successful applications are completely silent or have only static graphics, and in order that Android developers take full advantage of the advanced multimedia capabilities of today's smartphones, the system provides the android.media package, which contains many useful classes.

The MediaPlayer class allows the playback of both audio and video from raw resources, files, and network streams, and the MediaRecorder class makes it possible to record both sound and images.

Android also offers ways to manipulate sounds and create interactive effects through the use of the SoundPool class, which allows us to not only bend the pitch of our sounds but also to play more than one at a time.

One of the most pleasing aspects of the Android system is the way that it allows us to take near...