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 LiveDrawingView class


The first thing we will do is solve the problem of our LiveDrawingView class not being of the View type and having the wrong constructor. Update the class declaration as follows:

class LiveDrawingView(
        context: Context,
        screenX: Int)
    : SurfaceView(context){

You will be prompted to import the android.view.SurfaceView class, as shown in the following screenshot:

Click on OK to confirm.

SurfaceView is a descendant of View and now LiveDrawingView is, by inheritance, also a type of View. Look at the import statement that has been added. This relationship is made clear, as highlighted in the following code:

android.view.SurfaceView

Note

Remember that it is because of polymorphism that we can send descendants of View to the setContentView function in the MainActivity class, and that it is because of inheritance that LiveDrawingView is now a type of SurfaceView.

There are quite a few descendants of View that we could have extended to fix this initial...