Android Studio is the best IDE for developing Android apps, and it is available for free to anyone who wants to develop professional Android apps.
Now with Android Studio, we have a stable and faster IDE, and it comes with a lot of cool stuff such as Gradle, better refactoring methods, and a much better layout editor. If you have used Eclipse, then you will love this IDE.
In short, Android Studio has really brought back the fun of mobile development, and in this book, we will see how.
Chapter 1, Welcome to Android Studio, demonstrates how to configure Android Studio and Genymotion, which is a really fast emulator.
Chapter 2, Applications with a Cloud-based Backend, explains how to use Parse to develop an app using a cloud-based backend in no time.
Chapter 3, Material Design, explains the concept of material design and how to implement it using RecycleViews, CardViews, and transitions.
Chapter 4, Android Wear, covers the Android Wear API and how to develop your own watch face or other apps running on a smart watch.
Chapter 5, Size Does Matter, demonstrates how using fragments and additional resources can help you to create an app that is able to run on a phone, phablet, tablet, or even on TV. On the fly, we will connect to the YouTube API to make the recipes more fun.
Chapter 6, Capture and Share, is an in-depth tutorial about capturing and previewing images using the new Camera2 API, in particular. It also tells you how to share a captured image on Facebook.
Chapter 7, Content Providers and Observers, explains how you can benefit from using content providers to display and observe persisting data.
Chapter 8, Improving Quality, elaborates on applying patterns, unit testing, and code analysis tools.
Chapter 9, Improving Performance, covers how the Device Monitor can be used to optimize your apps' memory management and how the developer options on your phone can be used to detect overdraw and other performance issues.
Chapter 10, Beta Testing Your Apps, guides you through some of the final steps such as using build variants (types and flavors) and beta distribution on the Google Play Store. In addition to this, it covers how the run time permissions that come with Android Marshmallow (6.0) differ from the install permissions.
For this book, you need to download and set up Android Studio and the latest SDKs. Android Studio is free and is available for Windows, OSX, and Linux.
Having at least one phone, phablet, or tablet is strongly recommended, but in Chapter 1, Welcome to Android Studio we will introduce you to Genymotion, a really fast emulator, which you can use instead of a real device in most cases.
Finally, for some recipes, you need to have a Google developer account. If you do not have one yet, I suggest that you get one as soon as possible. After all, you will need one in order to be able to get your app into the Play Store.
This book is for anyone who is already familiar with the Java syntax and perhaps has already developed some Android apps, for example, using the Eclipse IDE.
This book explains the concepts of Android development using Android Studio in particular. To demonstrate these concepts, real-world recipes are provided. And, by real-world apps, I mean apps that do connect to a backend and communicate with Google Play services or Facebook and so on.
In this book, you will find several headings that appear frequently (Getting ready, How to do it, How it works, There's more, and See also).
To give clear instructions on how to complete a recipe, we use these sections as follows:
This section tells you what to expect in the recipe, and describes how to set up any software or any preliminary settings required for the recipe.
This section usually consists of a detailed explanation of what happened in the previous section.
This section consists of additional information about the recipe in order to make the reader more knowledgeable about the recipe.
All screenshots, shortcuts and other elements that are specific for Android Studio are based on Android Studio for OSX.
The main reason that OSX is being used is because it allows us to develop apps for both Android and iOS on the same machine. Other than that there is no reason to choose a particular OS other than your personal (or companies) preferences.
While the screenshots are based on Android Studio for OSX it is not too difficult for you to figure things out in case your OS is Windows or Linux.
Where needed the short cuts for Windows are mentioned as well.
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, pathnames, 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 void onSectionAttached(int number) {
switch (number) {
case 0:
mTitle = getString(
R.string.title_section_daily_notes);
break;
case 1:
mTitle = getString(
R.string.title_section_note_list);
break;
}
}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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