Book Image

Android Studio 2 Essentials - Second Edition

By : Belén Cruz Zapata
Book Image

Android Studio 2 Essentials - Second Edition

By: Belén Cruz Zapata

Overview of this book

Android Studio 2, the official IDE for Android application development, dramatically improves your workflow by letting you quickly see changes running on your device or emulator. It gives developers a unique platform by making app builds and deployment faster. This book will get you up and running with all the essential features of Android Studio 2 to optimize your development workflow. Starting off with the basic installation and configuration of Android Studio 2, this book will help you build a new project by showing you how to create a custom launcher icon and guiding you to choose your project. You will then gain an insight into the additional tools provided in Android Studio, namely the Software Development Kit (SDK) Manager, Android Virtual Device (AVD) Manager, and Javadoc. You’ll also see how to integrate Google Play Services in an Android project. Finally, you’ll become familiar with the Help section in Android Studio, which will enable you to search for support you might require in different scenarios.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Android Studio 2 Essentials Second Edition
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Changing the UI theme


Layouts and widgets are created using the default UI theme of our project. We can change the appearance of the elements of the UI by creating styles. Styles can be grouped to create a theme, and a theme can be applied to an activity or to the whole application. Some themes are provided by default, such as the Material Design or Holo style. Styles and themes are created as resources under the /src/res/values folder.

To continue our example, we are going to change the default colors of the theme that we are using in our app. Using the graphical editor, you can see that the selected theme for our layout is shown as AppTheme in the toolbar. This theme was created for our project and can be found in the styles file at /src/res/values/styles.xml.

Open the styles file. Android Studio suggests we use the Theme Editor. You can click on the message link or you can navigate to Tools | Android | Theme Editor to open it. You can see the Theme Editor in the next screenshot:

The left...