Android 3.0 Animation, a Beginner's Guide, will introduce each of the most popular animation techniques to you as an Android developer. Using step-by-step instructions, you will learn how to create interactive dynamic forms, moving graphics, and 3D motion.
You will be taken on a journey from simple stop motion animations and fades through to moving input forms, and then on to 3D motion and game graphics. In this book we will create standalone animated graphics, three-dimensional lifts, fades, and spins. You will become adept at moving and transforming form data to bring boring old input forms and displays to life.
Chapter 1, Animation Techniques on Android, is a guided tour of the diverse possibilities for animating content on Android.
Chapter 2, Frame Animations, teaches you to create and control animations that are composed of a series of still images.
Chapter 3, Tweening and Using Animators, adds animated life to the Views in your Android application.
Chapter 4, Animating Properties and Tweening Pages, introduces some more specialized animation capabilities, available in Android.
Chapter 5, Creating Classes for Tween Animation, shows you how to take control of the low-level behaviors of your animations to create new and distinctive movements.
Chapter 6, Using 3D Visual Techniques, takes techniques that we introduced in previous chapters and shows you how to use them to create 3D depth and rotation effects.
Chapter 7, 2D Graphics with Surfaces, introduces programmatic animations that you draw onto a blank canvas. This technique is ideal for writing games and advanced visualizations.
Chapter 8, Live Wallpapers, shows you how to build your animations into one of Android's most distinctive graphical features wallpapers that move.
Chapter 9, Practicing Good Practice and Style, shows you how animation can be used to make your application better looking and easier to use, as well as looking at the performance cost of animated graphics.
You should know how to program in Java and have experience using the Android SDK to make Android applications. You should understand basic object-oriented programming and know how to run your code on an Android device. You should also understand that Android uses XML files to show Views on screen.
You will require a computer that has the Android SDK installed and which has the Android 3.0 packages. You will also need a tool for entering the example code, compiling it, and deploying to an Android device or emulator. For this purpose, the book has been written with Eclipse users in mind, but the concepts and code presented will work equally well in IntelliJ IDEA or any other Android development environment that you are familiar with.
Because the Android applications in this book can be run on real devices, you may want to have an Android 3.0-compatible device, or higher. This is not necessary, but it is much more fun!
If you are familiar with developing Android applications and want to bring your apps to life by adding smashing animations, then this book is for you. This book assumes that you are comfortable with Java development and have familiarity with creating Android Views in XML and Java. The tutorials assume that you will want to work with Eclipse, but you can work just as well with your preferred development tools.
In this book, you will find several headings appearing frequently.
To give clear instructions of how to complete a procedure or task, we use:
1. Action 1
2. Action 2
3. Action 3
Instructions often need some extra explanation so that they make sense, so they are followed with:
This heading explains the working of tasks or instructions that you have just completed.
You will also find some other learning aids in the book, including:
These are short multiple choice questions intended to help you test your own understanding.
These set practical challenges and give you ideas for experimenting with what you have learned.
You will also 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: "Get the example android project, CountDroid, from the code bundle and compile it to an Android APK for deploying to a device."
A block of code is set as follows:
package com.packt.animation.viewexample;
import android.app.Activity;
import android.os.Bundle;
public class ViewExample extends Activity {
@Override public void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) {
super.onCreate(savedInstanceState);
MyTextView helloView = new MyTextView(this);
helloView.setText("Hello Views!");
setContentView(helloView);
}
}
When we wish to draw your attention to a particular part of a code block, the relevant lines or items are set in bold:
<ImageView android:id="@+id/stickman" android:layout_width="wrap_content" android:layout_height="wrap_content" android:src="@anim/stickman" /> <LinearLayout android:orientation="horizontal" android:layout_width="fill_parent" android:layout_height="wrap_content" android:gravity="center" >
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: " Download the APK you built to your favorite emulator or Android device, and launch the Counting Calculator activity.".
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