Book Image

Mastering Android Development with Kotlin

By : Miloš Vasić
Book Image

Mastering Android Development with Kotlin

By: Miloš Vasić

Overview of this book

Kotlin is a programming language intended to be a better Java, and it's designed to be usable and readable across large teams with different levels of knowledge. As a language, it helps developers build amazing Android applications in an easy and effective way. This book begins by giving you a strong grasp of Kotlin's features in the context of Android development and its APIs. Moving on, you'll take steps towards building stunning applications for Android. The book will show you how to set up the environment, and the difficulty level will grow steadily with the applications covered in the upcoming chapters. Later on, the book will introduce you to the Android Studio IDE, which plays an integral role in Android development. We'll use Kotlin's basic programming concepts such as functions, lambdas, properties, object-oriented code, safety aspects, type parameterization, testing, and concurrency, which will guide you through writing Kotlin code in production. We'll also show you how to integrate Kotlin into any existing Android project.
Table of Contents (24 chapters)
Title Page
Credits
About the Author
Acknowledgments
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface

Creating an application bar


We are continuing our journey through Android Application Development. So far, we have created a base for our application, defined the ground for a UI, and created major screens; however, these screens are not connected. In this chapter, we will connect them and make fantastic interaction.

Since everything starts from our MainActivity class, we will apply some improvements before we set some actions to trigger other screens. We have to wrap it with an application bar. What is an application bar? It's a piece of the UI that is used to access other parts of the application and provide visual structure with interactive elements. We already have one, but it's not the usual Android application bar. At this point, our application is has a modified application bar, and we want it to have a standard Android application bar.

Here, we will show you exactly how to create one.

Start by replacing a top-level activity extension to AppCompatActivity. We need to access features...