Book Image

Android Studio 2 Essentials - Second Edition

By : Belén Cruz Zapata
Book Image

Android Studio 2 Essentials - Second Edition

By: Belén Cruz Zapata

Overview of this book

Android Studio 2, the official IDE for Android application development, dramatically improves your workflow by letting you quickly see changes running on your device or emulator. It gives developers a unique platform by making app builds and deployment faster. This book will get you up and running with all the essential features of Android Studio 2 to optimize your development workflow. Starting off with the basic installation and configuration of Android Studio 2, this book will help you build a new project by showing you how to create a custom launcher icon and guiding you to choose your project. You will then gain an insight into the additional tools provided in Android Studio, namely the Software Development Kit (SDK) Manager, Android Virtual Device (AVD) Manager, and Javadoc. You’ll also see how to integrate Google Play Services in an Android project. Finally, you’ll become familiar with the Help section in Android Studio, which will enable you to search for support you might require in different scenarios.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Android Studio 2 Essentials Second Edition
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

The graphical editor


Open the main layout located at /src/main/res/layout/activity_main.xml in our project. The graphical editor will be opened by default. The center panel of the graphical editor is the Preview, where you can examine what your layout looks like. From the Preview you can see that initially this main layout contains just a text view with a Hello World! message. To switch between the graphical and text editors, click on the Design and Text tabs at the bottom of the screen, as shown in the screenshot:

The Toolbar options contains some options that can be used to change the layout style and preview. The Toolbar options, which are shown in the following screenshot, are explained throughout the chapter:

The Component Tree panel displays the components placed in the layout as a hierarchy. There are two components in our layout: a RelativeLayout as the root element, and a TextView which is the one displaying the Hello World! message. When you select one element on the Component Tree...