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

Building a real-world UI


These simple yet practical projects will begin to demonstrate how we can create some designs that might actually make it into a real app.

As usual, you can find all the code for this section in the download bundle in the Chapter 5/RealUI folder.

For a bit of variation, we can see the process of creating a new emulator; let's make ourselves a Nexus 7 AVD.

Creating a tablet emulator

So, we can really go to town on our designs and add loads of new widgets and views; let's make an emulator with more screen real estate. Note that the subsequent UI projects will work fine on a phone (although look a bit more squashed) but now seemed like a good time to take a look at making a new emulator:

  1. Click the AVD Manager icon in the toolbar.

  2. On the Your Virtual Devices screen, left-click the Create Virtual Device... button.

  3. Now we can see the Select Hardware window. In the Category column left-click Tablet. In the Name column left-click Nexus 7 (2012). Now left-click Next.

  4. On the System...