Book Image

Android Programming for Beginners

By : John Horton, Paresh Mayani
Book Image

Android Programming for Beginners

By: John Horton, Paresh Mayani

Overview of this book

Android is the most popular OS in the world. There are millions of devices accessing tens of thousands of applications. It is many people's entry point into the world of technology; it is an operating system for everyone. Despite this, the entry-fee to actually make Android applications is usually a computer science degree, or five years’ worth of Java experience. Android Programming for Beginners will be your companion to create Android applications from scratch—whether you’re looking to start your programming career, make an application for work, be reintroduced to mobile development, or are just looking to program for fun. We will introduce you to all the fundamental concepts of programming in an Android context, from the Java basics to working with the Android API. All examples are created from within Android Studio, the official Android development environment that helps supercharge your application development process. After this crash-course, we’ll dive deeper into Android programming and you’ll learn how to create applications with a professional-standard UI through fragments, make location-aware apps with Google Maps integration, and store your user’s data with SQLite. In addition, you’ll see how to make your apps multilingual, capture images from a device’s camera, and work with graphics, sound, and animations too. By the end of this book, you’ll be ready to start building your own custom applications in Android and Java.
Table of Contents (37 chapters)
Android Programming for Beginners
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

The Google Maps mini app


Create a new project and call it Simple Map. As we will be using a fairly new API, on the Target Android Devices screen, select API 19 Android 4.4(KitKat) in the Minimum SDK field. Also, on the Add an Activity to mobile screen, select the Google Maps Activity option. We will see that this will save us some work as well as provide us with some helpful information to get our app up and running with less complexity.

Note

Of course, you will also need a device with Android 4.4 or a later version to run this mini app. Furthermore, this app won't run on an emulator.

There are a couple of ways to use Google Maps. We can use an Intent to open the Google Maps app a bit like we did with the camera app, or we can connect directly to the Google Map's servers, which gives us the flexibility of making a better featured app.

We are going to use the second method that we discussed to get map data on our app by directly connecting to Google Map's servers. We will use the simpler, but...