This book is intended for developers working on mobile, desktop, or web platforms interested in learning how to build apps for wearable devices, also known as wear apps. Furthermore, you may already have apps featured on the Google Play store and are looking to provide Android Wear support for your existing Android apps. If either of these statements is true, then yes, this book is for you.
Our primary goal in this book is to provide you, the reader, with a solid understanding of the philosophy, thought process, development details, and methodologies involved in building well-designed and robust Android Wear applications. We'll cover the advantages and the disadvantages of the wearable computing paradigm, and in doing so, we hope to provide a strong foundation for building wearable apps to meet practical and real-world use cases.
We will explore a wide range of concepts and features, from basic to medium to advanced, with varying degrees of complexity. Code samples accompanying each chapter are intended to give you hands-on knowledge of using the tools, libraries, SDKs, and other relevant technology needed to build Android Wear apps.
As you journey through the chapters of this book, you can expect to achieve the following objectives:
Understand wearable computing technology
Set up your development environment for building Android Wear apps using Android Studio
Begin a mastery of the Android Wear SDK and APIs
Understand the commonly used UI patterns and UX principles surrounding Android Wear app development
Work with different form factors of wearable devices (round, square)
Take advantage of the sensors available on Android Wear devices
Develop Android Wear sample apps to try out the concepts you learn
Communicate between Android mobile (handheld) and Android Wear apps
Learn how to publish Android Wear apps to the Google Play store
Chapter 1, Introduction to Wearable Computing, covers the basics of wearable computing in general and how the technology has evolved. It also includes discussions on mobile computing, ubiquitous computing, and cloud computing.
Chapter 2, Setting up the Development Environment, shifts the focus on getting the readers familiar with setting up a development environment, from IDE installation to a discussion of the SDKs and libraries needed for Android Wear development.
Chapter 3, Developing an Android Wear App, walks the reader through step-by-step instructions for developing an Android Wear application, the Today app, from scratch using Android Studio.
Chapter 4, Developing Watch UIs, extends the Today app using UI components available in the Android Wear SDK and builds custom UI components using custom layouts.
Chapter 5, Synchronizing Data, introduces the idea of the need for a companion handheld app, including the steps to pair a handheld with an Android Wear emulator, thereby expanding your environment for wearable app development. The Today app is further extended to demonstrate these concepts.
Chapter 6, Contextual Notifications, discusses notifications in Android Wear and extends the Today app with an On This Day activity to demonstrate the Android Wear Notifications API.
Chapter 7, Voice Interactions, Sensors, and Tracking, discusses the voice capabilities offered by the Wear API. We define a voice action to launch our app. We introduce device sensors and discuss how they can be used to track data.
Chapter 8, Creating a Custom UI, covers the design principles that are central to the Android Wear UI space and examines a few common Wear UI patterns. We also augment the On This Day activity to display in a user-friendly format.
Chapter 9, Material Design, provides a conceptual understanding of material design and touches upon a few key principles specific to wearable app design and development. We solidify our understanding by extending our Todo app from the previous chapters to incorporate a navigation drawer that lets us switch between to-do categories, view items, and perform actions specific to each category.
Chapter 10, Watch Faces, introduces the concept of watch faces in this chapter. After a brief survey of the Android Wear APIs available to help us develop watch faces, we develop a simple interactive watch face.
Chapter 11, Advanced Features and Concepts, describes the design concerns and API features related to making apps run as if they were always on. We develop an activity to demonstrate the always-on capability provided by the Wear API. We also touch upon debugging wear apps over Bluetooth connections.
Chapter 12, Publishing Apps to Google Play, discusses the tooling available to test Android Wear apps and how to automate UI testing. We conclude the chapter with step-by-step instructions to get the app ready for publishing.
You will require the following set of tools to try out the codes in the book and to practice the application development yourself:
Android Studio v2 or greater
JDK v7 or greater
Git version control
A development system with decent hardware configurations, such as a fast CPU and adequate RAM for developing mobile applications
Java application developers—web, desktop, or mobile who wants to gain exposure to the Android Wear platform and equip themselves with the knowledge necessary to master the development of Android Wear apps.
In this book, you will find a number of text styles that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, path names, dummy URLs, user input and Twitter handles are shown as follows: "We can include other contexts through the use of the include directive."
A block of code is set as follows:
public static void Main(string[] args)
{
var host = new WebHostBuilder()
.UseKestrel()
}
Any command-line input or output is written as follows:
vi run json
New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, for example, in menus or dialog boxes, appear in the text like this: "Clicking the Next button moves you to the next screen."
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