Book Image

Android Programming for Beginners - Second Edition

By : John Horton
Book Image

Android Programming for Beginners - Second Edition

By: John Horton

Overview of this book

Are you trying to start a career in programming, but haven't found the right way in? Do you have a great idea for an app, but don't know how to make it a reality? Or maybe you're just frustrated that in order to learn Android, you must know Java. If so, then this book is for you. This new and expanded second edition of Android Programming for Beginners will be your companion to create Android Pie applications from scratch. We will introduce you to all the fundamental concepts of programming in an Android context, from the basics of Java to working with the Android API. All examples use the up-to-date API classes, and are created from within Android Studio, the official Android development environment that helps supercharge your application development process. After this crash course, we'll dive deeper into Android programming and you'll learn how to create applications with a professional-standard UI through fragments and store your user's data with SQLite. In addition, you'll see how to make your apps multilingual, draw to the screen with a finger, and work with graphics, sound, and animations too. By the end of this book, you'll be ready to start building your own custom applications in Android and Java.
Table of Contents (35 chapters)
Android Programming for Beginners - Second Edition
Contributors
Preface
Other Books You May Enjoy
Index

Using the Canvas class


Let's look at the code and the different stages required to get drawing, then we can quickly move on to drawing something for real with the Canvas demo app.

Preparing the instances of the required classes

The first step is to turn the classes we need into real, working things, objects/instances.

First we state the type, which in this case happens to be a class, and then we state the name we would like our working object to have:

// Here are all the objects(instances)
// of classes that we need to do some drawing
ImageView myImageView;
Bitmap myBlankBitmap;
Canvas myCanvas;
Paint myPaint;

The previous code declares reference type variables of the ImageView, Bitmap, Canvas, and Paint types. They are named myImageView, myBlankBitmap, myCanvas, and myPaint, respectively.

Initializing the objects

Next, we need to initialize our new objects before using them:

// Initialize all the objects ready for drawing
// We will do this inside the onCreate method
int widthInPixels = 800;
int...