Book Image

Android Programming for Beginners - Second Edition

By : John Horton
Book Image

Android Programming for Beginners - Second Edition

By: John Horton

Overview of this book

Are you trying to start a career in programming, but haven't found the right way in? Do you have a great idea for an app, but don't know how to make it a reality? Or maybe you're just frustrated that in order to learn Android, you must know Java. If so, then this book is for you. This new and expanded second edition of Android Programming for Beginners will be your companion to create Android Pie applications from scratch. We will introduce you to all the fundamental concepts of programming in an Android context, from the basics of Java to working with the Android API. All examples use the up-to-date API classes, and 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 and store your user's data with SQLite. In addition, you'll see how to make your apps multilingual, draw to the screen with a finger, 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 (35 chapters)
Android Programming for Beginners - Second Edition
Contributors
Preface
Other Books You May Enjoy
Index

Exploring the palette – Part 2, and more anonymous classes


Now that we have seen how anonymous classes work, specifically with RadioGroup and RadioButton, we can now continue exploring the palette and look at how anonymous classes work with some more UI widgets.

Switch

The Switch (not to be confused with the lowercase switch Java keyword) widget is just like a Button except that it has two possible states that can be read and responded to.

An obvious use for the Switch widget would be to show and hide something. Remember in our Java meet UI app in Chapter 12, The Stack, the Heap, and the Garbage Collector, that we used a Button to show and hide a TextView?

Each time we hid/showed the TextView, we changed the Text property on the Button to make it plain what would happen if it was clicked again. What might have been more logical for the user and more straightforward for us as programmers would have been to use a Switch, as illustrated here:

The following code assumes that we already have an...