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 text-based editor


Change the graphical editor to the text editor by clicking on the Text tab:

The Toolbar panel is the same as that on the graphical editor. The Preview window displays the layout, but it cannot be changed. To do that, you should use the Design tab instead. The components are added to the layout using their XML declarations. The properties are also configured using XML declarations. Like the graphical editor, the text editor contains two XML elements: a relative layout as the root element and the text view element inside the root layout.

The XML tag names define the type of component that we are declaring. For the relative layout, we use the RelativeLayout tag, and for the text view, we use the TextView tag. We can add properties to the elements by including attributes in the XML tags. For example, the text view in our main layout has three properties:

  • android:layout_width, with the wrap_content value: This property sets the element width inside its parent element. The...