Book Image

Hands-On Android UI Development

By : Jason Morris
Book Image

Hands-On Android UI Development

By: Jason Morris

Overview of this book

A great user interface (UI) can spell the difference between success and failure for any new application. This book will show you not just how to code great UIs, but how to design them as well. It will take novice Android developers on a journey, showing them how to leverage the Android platform to produce stunning Android applications. Begin with the basics of creating Android applications and then move on to topics such as screen and layout design. Next, learn about techniques that will help improve performance for your application. Also, explore how to create reactive applications that are fast, animated, and guide the user toward their goals with minimal distraction. Understand Android architecture components and learn how to build your application to automatically respond to changes made by the user. Great platforms are not always enough, so this book also focuses on creating custom components, layout managers, and 2D graphics. Also, explore many tips and best practices to ease your UI development process. By the end, you'll be able to design and build not only amazing UIs, but also systems that provide the best possible user experience.
Table of Contents (21 chapters)
Title Page
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface
13
Activity Lifecycle

Data storage in Android


Almost every application needs to store data persistently at some point. Any data that needs to remain intact when your application is stopped must be placed in some kind of data storage system where you can retrieve it again later. You can store all the data on the server, but then your application will only function when the user has an active internet connection and will only ever be as fast as their available connection. You can also store data as files on the device's local filesystem, but this means you need to either load all the data into memory and save the whole application state every time it changes, or you need to write complicated logic to maintain integrity between the various files your application will write.

The Android ecosystem has a large number of database systems available, the most popular of which is probably SQLite. Data can be saved in SQLite tables and retrieved through structured queries. This provides an ideal way to store all of your...