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

Downloading images


Downloading an image and displaying it with the help of ImageView can be done in a single line. Since Android development started, this is something that every developer has done. Android is a technology that is more than five years old, so we can expect this technique to be quite advanced and to find-third party solutions that facilitate it. That said, this book wouldn't be called Mastering Android if it didn't explain the process of downloading an image and displaying it without any third-party library.

It is good to use the latest library in your apps, but it is better to understand the solution that you are implementing, and it is even better to be able to build this library yourself.

While working with images, we need to handle everything from network connection to the downloading of array bytes and their conversion to Bitmap. On some occasions, it makes sense to store the images on a disk so that the next time we open the app, these images will already be there.

Even...