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

Building a menu with LinearLayout


LinearLayout is probably the simplest layout that Android offers. As the name suggests, all the UI items within it are laid out linearly. You have just two choices – vertical and horizontal. By adding the following line of code (or editing via the Attribute window), you can configure a LinearLayout to lay things out vertically:

android:orientation="vertical"

You can then (as you could probably have guessed) change "vertical" to "horizontal" to lay things out horizontally.

Before we can do anything with LinearLayout, we need to add one to a layout file. And, as we are building three layouts in this project, we also need a new layout file.

Adding a LinearLayout to the project

In the project window, expand the res folder. Now right-click the layout folder and select New. Notice that there is an option for Layout resource file, as shown in the following screenshot:

Select Layout resource file and you will see the New Resource File dialog window:

In the File name...