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

Introducing the NavigationView


What's so great about the NavigationView? Well the first thing that might catch your eye is that it can be made to look extremely stylish. Look at this following screenshot, which shows off a NavigationView in action in the Google Play app:

To be honest, right from the outset, ours is not going to be as fancy as the one in the Google Play app. However, the same functionality will be present in our app.

What else is neat about this UI is the way that it slides to hide or reveal itself when required. It is because of this behavior that it can be a significant size, making it extremely flexible regarding the options that can be added to it and, when the user is finished with it, it completely disappears—like a drawer.

Note

I suggest trying the Google Play app now and seeing how it works, if you haven't already.

You can slide your thumb or finger from the left-hand edge of the screen and the drawer will slowly slide out. You can, of course, slide it away again in the...