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

Creating a Toast using a custom layout


We've used Toasts quite a bit already in previous chapters as they provide a quick and easy way to display information—both for the user and for ourselves when debugging.

The previous examples have all used the simple one-line syntax, but the Toast isn't limited to this. Toasts, like most components in Android, can be customized, as we'll demonstrate in this recipe.

Android Studio offers a shortcut for making the simple Toast statement. As you start to type the Toast command, press Ctrl + Spacebar and you'll see the following:

Press Enter to auto-complete. Then, press Ctrl + Spacebar again and you'll see the following:

When you press Enter again, it will auto-complete with the following:

Toast.makeText(MainActivity.this, "", Toast.LENGTH_SHORT).show();

In this recipe, we'll use the Toast Builder to change the default layout, and gravity to create a custom Toast as shown in this screenshot:

Getting ready

Create a new project in Android Studio and call it: CustomToast...