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

Summary


This was probably the most technical chapter so far. Threads, game loops, timing, using interfaces along with the Activity lifecycle, and so on… it's an awfully long list of topics to cram in.

If the exact interrelationships between these things are not entirely clear, it is not a problem. All you need to know is that when the user starts and stops drawing with their finger, the LiveDrawingActivity class will handle starting and stopping the thread by calling the LiveDrawingView class's pause and resume methods. It achieves this via the overridden onPause and onResume methods, which are called by the OS.

Once the thread is running, the code inside the run method executes alongside the UI thread that is listening for user input. As we call the update and draw methods from the run method at the same time as keeping track of how long each frame is taking, our app is ready to rock and roll.

We just need to allow the user to add some particles to their artwork, which we can then update...