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.
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.
Chapter 1, Activities: Create and manage the fundamental components of any Android application.
Chapter 2, Layouts: Design and format screen layouts.
Chapter 3, Widgets: Include buttons, images and a wide variety of widgets in an application.
Chapter 4, Menus: Provide and manage pop-up menus for activities and applications.
Chapter 5, Data and Security : Store and share private or public data, set up databases, and control permissions.
Chapter 6, Detecting User Activity: Read sensors, detect gestures, and manage touch-screen events.
Chapter 7, Notifying the User: Use and customize dialog boxes pop-ups and the status bar.
Chapter 8, Graphics and Animation: Include and manipulate images and create animations.
Chapter 9, Multimedia: Add audio and video to an application and take control of the built-in camera.
Chapter 10, Telephony, Networks, and the Web: Incorporate phone and network functions in applications and connect them to the Internet.
Chapter 11, GPS, Locations, and Maps: Detect device location and include Google maps in applications.
If you are new to Android application development and looking for a quick start, or if you are an experienced Android developer looking for a reference guide, then this book is for you. Ideally, you should know some Java and a little about mark-up languages but this is by no means necessary. This book will teach you how to write rich Android applications from scratch in no time.
In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text are shown as follows: "We can include other contexts through the use of the include directive."
A block of code is set as follows:
<activity android:name=".DeclaringAnActivity" android:label="Welcome to the Android 3.0 Cookbook" android:screenOrientation="portrait"> ... </activity>
Any command-line input or output is written as follows:
keytool.exe -list -alias androiddebugkey -keystore "C:\Users\<user>\.android\debug.keystore" -storepass android -keypass android
New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this: "clicking the Next button moves you to the next screen".
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