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

Adding layouts within layouts


The solution to laying out some elements with a different orientation to others is to nest layouts within layouts. Here is how to do it.

From the Layouts category of the palette, drag a LinearLayout (Horizontal) onto the design, placing it just below the Multiline Text. Notice that there is a blue border occupying all the space below the Multiline Text:

This indicates that our new LinearLayout (Horizontal) is filling the space. Keep this blue border area in mind, as it is where we will put the next item on our UI.

Now, go back to the Text category of the palette and drag a TextView onto the new LinearLayout we just added. Notice how the TextView sits snuggly in the top left-hand corner of the new LinearLayout:

At first, this seems no different to what happened with the previous vertical LinearLayout that was part of our UI from the start. But watch what happens when we add our next piece of the UI.

Note

The term used to refer to adding layouts within layouts is...