Book Image

Mastering Android Application Development

By : Antonio Pachon
Book Image

Mastering Android Application Development

By: Antonio Pachon

Overview of this book

There are millions of Android apps out there for people to download – how do you make sure yours has the edge? It’s not always about innovation and ideas – the most successful apps are those that are able to satisfy customer demands – they’re the ones that look the best, the fastest, and the easiest and most intuitive to use. This book shows you how to create Android applications that do precisely that – it has been designed help you consider and answer those questions throughout the development process, so you can create applications that stand out against the crowd. Learn how to create exemplary UIs that contribute to a satisfying user experience through the lens of Material Design, and explore how to harness the range of features within the Android SDK to help you. Dive deeper into complex programming concepts and discover how to leverage concurrency and navigate memory management and image handling. You’ll also find further guidance on testing and debugging so you can guarantee that your application is reliable and robust for users. Beyond this you’ll find out how to extend your app and add greater functionality, including notifications, location services, adverts and app billing (essential if you want to properly monetize your creation!). To make sure you have confidence at every stage in the process, the book also shows you how to release your app to the Play store – to make sure your maximising your efforts to create a popular Android application!
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
Mastering Android Application Development
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Adding a marker


The Google map is now visible, but it does not show any useful data for the user yet. To achieve this, we will add map markers to indicate points of interest for the user. These will be the locations of different job offers, which we will download from our Parse database.

We will also learn how to change the icon used to mark a point on the map to a custom image as well as have a title on the marker. This will make our app look more interesting and informative.

Retrieving data from Parse

Before we can display all our markers, we need to download all the necessary data from Parse.

In MyMapFragment.java, we will use ParseQuery to retrieve a list of the locations and use this to get the relevant information for each job offer before it is displayed. Perform the following steps:

  • Create a private member variable named googleMap of the GoogleMap type and override the onResume() method.

  • In onResume(), check whether or not googleMap is empty; if it is, this means that we have not yet added...