Book Image

Android Programming for Beginners

By : John Horton, Paresh Mayani
Book Image

Android Programming for Beginners

By: John Horton, Paresh Mayani

Overview of this book

Android is the most popular OS in the world. There are millions of devices accessing tens of thousands of applications. It is many people's entry point into the world of technology; it is an operating system for everyone. Despite this, the entry-fee to actually make Android applications is usually a computer science degree, or five years’ worth of Java experience. Android Programming for Beginners will be your companion to create Android applications from scratch—whether you’re looking to start your programming career, make an application for work, be reintroduced to mobile development, or are just looking to program for fun. We will introduce you to all the fundamental concepts of programming in an Android context, from the Java basics to working with the Android API. All examples are created from within Android Studio, the official Android development environment that helps supercharge your application development process. After this crash-course, we’ll dive deeper into Android programming and you’ll learn how to create applications with a professional-standard UI through fragments, make location-aware apps with Google Maps integration, and store your user’s data with SQLite. In addition, you’ll see how to make your apps multilingual, capture images from a device’s camera, and work with graphics, sound, and animations too. By the end of this book, you’ll be ready to start building your own custom applications in Android and Java.
Table of Contents (37 chapters)
Android Programming for Beginners
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

The device detection mini app


To make this app, create a new project and call it Device Detection. Delete the default Hello world! widget. Drag Button onto the top of the screen and set its onClick property to detectDevice. We will code this method in a minute.

Drag two LargeText widgets onto the layout and set their id properties to txtOrientation and txtResolution, respectively. You should now have a layout that looks something like this:

Add the following members just after the MainActivity class declaration to hold references to our two TextView widgets:

private TextView txtOrientation;
private TextView txtResolution;

Now, in the onCreate method of MainActivity, just after the call to setContentView, add this code:

// Get a reference to our TextView widgets
txtOrientation = (TextView) findViewById(R.id.txtOrientation);
txtResolution = (TextView) findViewById(R.id.txtResolution);

After onCreate, add the method that handles our button click and runs our detection code:

public void detectDevice...