Book Image

Android Studio 4.1 Development Essentials – Kotlin Edition

By : Neil Smyth
Book Image

Android Studio 4.1 Development Essentials – Kotlin Edition

By: Neil Smyth

Overview of this book

Android 11 has a ton of new capabilities. It comes up with three foci: a people-centric approach to communication, controls to let users quickly access and manage all of their smart devices, and privacy to give users more ways to control how data on devices is shared. This book starts off with the steps necessary to set up an Android development and testing environment, followed by an introduction to programming in Kotlin. An overview of Android Studio and its architecture is provided, 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 are also covered in detail. This edition of the book also covers printing, transitions, and cloud-based file storage; 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, Kotlin, and Android Jetpack. The code files for the book can be found here: https://www.ebookfrenzy.com/retail/as41kotlin/index.php
Table of Contents (95 chapters)
95
Index

24.1 Basic vs. Empty Activity Templates

As outlined in the chapter entitled “The Anatomy of an Android Application”, Android applications are made up of one or more activities. An activity is a standalone module of application functionality that usually correlates directly to a single user interface screen. As such, when working with the Android Studio Layout Editor we are invariably working on the layout for an activity.

When creating a new Android Studio project, a number of different templates are available to be used as the starting point for the user interface of the main activity. The most basic of these templates are the Basic Activity and Empty Activity templates. Although these seem similar at first glance, there are actually considerable differences between the two options. To see these differences within the layout editor, use the View Options menu to enable Show System UI as shown in Figure 24-1 below:

Figure 24-1

The Empty Activity template creates...