Book Image

Android Studio Cookbook

By : Mike van Drongelen
Book Image

Android Studio Cookbook

By: Mike van Drongelen

Overview of this book

This book starts with an introduction of Android Studio and why you should use this IDE rather than Eclipse. Moving ahead, it teaches you to build a simple app that requires no backend setup but uses Google Cloud or Parse instead. After that, you will learn how to create an Android app that can send and receive text and images using Google Cloud or Parse as a backend. It explains the concepts of Material design and how to apply them to an Android app. Also, it shows you how to build an app that runs on an Android wear device. Later, it explains how to build an app that takes advantage of the latest Android SDK while still supporting older Android versions. It also demonstrates how the performance of an app can be improved and how memory management tools that come with the Android Studio IDE can help you achieve this. By the end of the book, you will be able to develop high quality apps with a minimum amount of effort using the Android Studio IDE.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Android Studio Cookbook
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Here comes the bad app – performance improvements


What are the do's and don'ts for Android application development to avoid performance issues, even if they may not occur on your own device? Testing Android apps is hard because there are so many devices out there. It is better to be safe than sorry, so write your code carefully.

Some say that there are two basic rules to writing efficient code: don't do the work that you don't need to do (hence the DRY and YAGNI principles from Chapter 8, Improving Quality) and do not allocate memory if you can avoid it. In addition to this, it is also interesting to know that there are various libraries available that will not just save you the time but also prove to be very efficient. Of course, reinventing the wheel could be error prone as well.

Think of the RetroFit library, for example, that will make it much easier to write code to consume web services, or think of Picasso, an image loading library that will load an image from a URL with just one line...