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 AVD Manager


The AVD Manager is an Android tool accessible from Android Studio to manage the Android virtual devices that will be executed in the Android emulator.

To open the AVD Manager from Android Studio, navigate to Tools | Android | AVD Manager. You can also click on the shortcut from the toolbar. The AVD Manager displays the list of the existing virtual devices. Since we have not created any virtual devices, the list will initially be empty. To create our first virtual device, click on the Create Virtual Device button to open the configuration dialog.

The first step is to select the hardware configuration of the virtual device. The device definitions are listed on the left-hand side of the window. Device definitions can be classified into one of these categories: Phone, Tablet, Wear, or TV. Select one of them in the Phone category, such as Nexus 6, to examine its details on the right-hand side, as shown in the following screenshot:

We can also configure our own hardware device definitions...