Book Image

Android Application Development Cookbook - Second Edition

By : Kyle Mew
Book Image

Android Application Development Cookbook - Second Edition

By: Kyle Mew

Overview of this book

The Android OS has the largest installation base of any operating system in the world; there has never been a better time to learn Android development to write your own applications, or to make your own contributions to the open source community! This “cookbook” will make it easy for you to jump to a topic of interest and get what you need to implement the feature in your own application. If you are new to Android and learn best by “doing,” then this book will provide many topics of interest. Starting with the basics of Android development, we move on to more advanced concepts, and we’ll guide you through common tasks developers struggle to solve. The first few chapters cover the basics including Activities, Layouts, Widgets, and the Menu. From there, we cover fragments and data storage (including SQLite), device sensors, the camera, and GPS. Then we move on more advanced topics such as graphics and animation (including OpenGL), multi-threading with AsyncTask, and Internet functionality with Volley. We’ll also demonstrate Google Maps and Google Cloud Messaging (also known as Push Notifications) using the Google API Library. Finally, we’ll take a look at several online services designed especially for Android development. Take your application big-time with full Internet web services without having to become a server admin by leveraging the power of Backend as a Service (BaaS) providers.
Table of Contents (23 chapters)
Android Application Development Cookbook Second Edition
Credits
Disclaimer
About the Authors
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Taking a picture using the (old) Camera API


The previous recipe demonstrated how to use an intent to call the default photo application. If you only need a quick photo, the intent is probably the ideal solution. If not, and you need more control of the camera, this recipe will show you how to use the camera directly with the Camera API.

There are actually two recipes for using the Camera API—one for the original Camera API released in Android 1.0 (API 1) and Camera2 API, released in Android 5.0 (API 21). We'll cover both the new and the old APIs. Ideally, you will want to write your application to the latest and greatest APIs available, but at the time of this writing, Android 5.0 (API 21) only has about a 23 percent market share. If you only use the Camera2 API, you exclude over 75 percent of the market.

Write your app to use Camera2 API to take advantage of the new features available, but still have a functional application using the original Camera API for the rest of your users. To help...