Book Image

Android Programming with Kotlin for Beginners

By : John Horton
5 (1)
Book Image

Android Programming with Kotlin for Beginners

5 (1)
By: John Horton

Overview of this book

Android is the most popular mobile operating system in the world and Kotlin has been declared by Google as a first-class programming language to build Android apps. With the imminent arrival of the most anticipated Android update, Android 10 (Q), this book gets you started building apps compatible with the latest version of Android. It adopts a project-style approach, where we focus on teaching the fundamentals of Android app development and the essentials of Kotlin by building three real-world apps and more than a dozen mini-apps. The book begins by giving you a strong grasp of how Kotlin and Android work together before gradually moving onto exploring the various Android APIs for building stunning apps for Android with ease. You will learn to make your apps more presentable using different layouts. You will dive deep into Kotlin programming concepts such as variables, functions, data structures, Object-Oriented code, and how to connect your Kotlin code to the UI. You will learn to add multilingual text so that your app is accessible to millions of more potential users. You will learn how animation, graphics, and sound effects work and are implemented in your Android app. By the end of the book, you will have sound knowledge about significant Kotlin programming concepts and start building your own fully featured Android apps.
Table of Contents (33 chapters)
Android Programming with Kotlin for Beginners
Contributors
Preface
Index

Adding buttons to the main layout file


Here, we will add a couple of buttons to the screen and will then explore a quick way to make them do something. We will add a button in two different ways; first, using the visual designer, and second, by adding to and editing the XML code directly.

Adding a button via the visual designer

To get started adding our first button, switch back to the design view by clicking on the Design tab underneath the XML code that we have just been discussing. The button is highlighted in the following screenshot:

Notice that in the left-hand side of the layout, we have a window that is called Palette:

The palette window is divided into two parts. The left-hand list has the categories of the UI elements and allows you to select a category, while the right-hand side shows you all the available UI elements from the currently selected category.

Make sure that the Common category is selected, as shown in the previous screenshot. Now, left-click and hold on the Button widget...