Book Image

Android Programming with Kotlin for Beginners

By : John Horton
5 (1)
Book Image

Android Programming with Kotlin for Beginners

5 (1)
By: John Horton

Overview of this book

Android is the most popular mobile operating system in the world and Kotlin has been declared by Google as a first-class programming language to build Android apps. With the imminent arrival of the most anticipated Android update, Android 10 (Q), this book gets you started building apps compatible with the latest version of Android. It adopts a project-style approach, where we focus on teaching the fundamentals of Android app development and the essentials of Kotlin by building three real-world apps and more than a dozen mini-apps. The book begins by giving you a strong grasp of how Kotlin and Android work together before gradually moving onto exploring the various Android APIs for building stunning apps for Android with ease. You will learn to make your apps more presentable using different layouts. You will dive deep into Kotlin programming concepts such as variables, functions, data structures, Object-Oriented code, and how to connect your Kotlin code to the UI. You will learn to add multilingual text so that your app is accessible to millions of more potential users. You will learn how animation, graphics, and sound effects work and are implemented in your Android app. By the end of the book, you will have sound knowledge about significant Kotlin programming concepts and start building your own fully featured Android apps.
Table of Contents (33 chapters)
Android Programming with Kotlin for Beginners
Contributors
Preface
Index

Coding the widget exploration app


The first part of the Kotlin code that we need to change is to make sure that our new layout is displayed. We can do so by changing the call to the setContentView function in the onCreate function to look like this:

setContentView(R.layout.exploration_layout)

There are many import statements that are needed for this app, so let's add them all up front to save us from having to keep mentioning them as we proceed. Add the following import statements:

import androidx.appcompat.app.AppCompatActivity
import android.graphics.Color
import android.os.Bundle
import android.view.View
import android.widget.CompoundButton
import android.widget.RadioButton
import kotlinx.android.synthetic.main.exploration_layout.*

The preceding code also includes the …exploration_layout.* code (as highlighted in the preceding code) to automatically enable us to use the id attributes that we have just configured as the instance names in our Kotlin code. This saves us from using the findViewByID...