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 precise UI with ConstraintLayout


Open the ConstraintLayout that was auto-generated when we created the project. It is probably already in a tab at the top of the editor. If not, it will be in the res/layout folder. Its name is activity_main.xml.

Inspect the XML in the Text tab and note that it is empty, apart from a TextView that says Hello World. Switch back to the Design tab, left-click the TextView to select it, and tap the Delete key to get rid of it.

Now we can build ourselves a simple, yet intricate, UI. ConstraintLayout is very useful when you want to position parts of your UI very precisely and/or relative to the other parts.

Adding a CalenderView

To get started, look in the Widgets category of the palette and find the CalenderView. Drag and drop the CalenderView near the top and horizontally central. As you drag the CalenderView around, notice that it jumps/snaps to certain locations.

Also notice the subtle visual cues that show when the view is aligned. I have highlighted...