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

The design support library


The design support library introduces material design components in an official way and is compatible with all the versions of Android starting with Android 2.1. Material design is a new design language introduced with Android Lollipop. Before this library was released, we watched videos and considered examples of apps using these components, but there was no official way to use it. This established a baseline for the apps to follow; therefore, to master Android, we need to master material design. You can compile it using the following line:

compile 'com.android.support:design:22.2.0'

This library includes a visual component as the input text with floating text, floating action buttons, TabLayout…, and so on. However, material design is not only about visual components; it's about movement and transitions between its elements, and for this reason, CoordinatorLayout has been introduced.

Introducing TabLayout

The TabLayout design library allows us to have fixed or scrollable...