The one feature that stands out in Android Studio above all others, including the Gradle build system, is the powerful User Interface(UI) development tools. The IDE provides a variety of views of our designs, allowing us to combine drag and drop construction and hard code in the development of a UI. Android Studio also comes equipped with a comprehensive preview system, which allows us to test our designs on any manner of device before running the project on an actual device. Along with these features, Android Studio also includes useful support libraries, such as the design library for creating material design layouts and the Percent Support Library for simplifying complex, proportional designs.
This chapter is the first of four, covering UI development. In it, we take a closer look at Studio's Layout Editors and tools. We will be building working interfaces using...