Book Image

Android Studio 4.0 Development Essentials - Java Edition

By : Neil Smyth
Book Image

Android Studio 4.0 Development Essentials - Java Edition

By: Neil Smyth

Overview of this book

Android rolls out frequent updates to meet the demands of the dynamic mobile market and to enable its developer community to lead advancements in application development. This book focuses on the updated features of Android Studio (the fully integrated development environment launched by Google) to build reliable Android applications using Java. The book starts by outlining the steps necessary to set up an Android development and testing environment. You’ll then learn how to create user interfaces with the help of Android Studio Layout Editor, XML files, and by writing the code in Java. The book introduces you to Android architecture components and advanced topics such as intents, touchscreen handling, gesture recognition, multi-window support integration, and biometric authentication, and lets you explore key features of Android Studio 4.0, including the layout editor, direct reply notifications, and dynamic delivery. You’ll also cover Android Jetpack in detail and create a sample app project using the ViewModel component. Finally, you’ll upload your app to the Google Play Console and handle the build process with Gradle. By the end of this book, you’ll have gained the skills necessary to develop applications using Android Studio 4.0 and Java.
Table of Contents (88 chapters)
88
Index

19.1 Design and Layout Views

The chapter entitled “A Guide to the Android Studio Layout Editor Tool” explained that the Android Studio Layout Editor tool provides two ways to view the user interface layout of an activity in the form of Design and Layout (also known as blueprint) views. These views of the layout may be displayed individually or, as in Figure 19-1, side by side:

Figure 19-1

The Design view (positioned on the left in the above figure) presents a “what you see is what you get” representation of the layout, wherein the layout appears as it will within the running app. The Layout view, on the other hand, displays a blueprint style of view where the widgets are represented by shaded outlines. As can be seen in Figure 19-1 above, Layout view also displays the constraint connections (in this case opposing constraints used to center a button within the layout). These constraints are also overlaid onto the Design view when a specific widget...