Book Image

Android Studio 4.1 Development Essentials – Java Edition

By : Neil Smyth
Book Image

Android Studio 4.1 Development Essentials – Java Edition

By: Neil Smyth

Overview of this book

For developers, Android 11 has a ton of new capabilities. The goal of this book is to teach the skills necessary to develop Android-based applications using the Java programming language. This book begins with the steps necessary to set up an Android development and testing environment. An overview of Android Studio along with the architecture of Android is covered next, followed by an in-depth look at the design of Android applications and user interfaces using the Android Studio environment. You will also learn about the Android architecture components along with some advanced topics such as touch screen handling, gesture recognition, the recording and playback of audio, app links, dynamic delivery, the AndroidStudio profiler, Gradle build configuration, and submitting apps to the Google Play Developer Console. The concepts of material design, including the use of floating action buttons, Snackbars, tabbed interfaces, card views, navigation drawers, and collapsing toolbars are a highlight of this book. This edition of the book also covers printing, transitions, and cloud-based file storage; the foldable device support is the cherry on the cake. By the end of this course, you will be able to develop Android 11 Apps using Android Studio 4.1, Java, and Android Jetpack. The code files for the book can be found here: https://www.ebookfrenzy.com/retail/androidstudio41/index.php
Table of Contents (88 chapters)
88
Index

3.7 Reviewing the Layout and Resource Files

Before moving on to the next step, we are going to look at some of the internal aspects of user interface design and resource handling. In the previous section, we made some changes to the user interface by modifying the activity_main.xml file using the Layout Editor tool. In fact, all that the Layout Editor was doing was providing a user-friendly way to edit the underlying XML content of the file. In practice, there is no reason why you cannot modify the XML directly in order to make user interface changes and, in some instances, this may actually be quicker than using the Layout Editor tool. In the top right-hand corner of the Layout Editor panel are three buttons as highlighted in Figure 3-19 below:

Figure 3-19

By default, the editor will be in Design mode whereby just the visual representation of the layout is displayed. The left-most button will switch to Code mode to display the XML for the layout, while the middle button...