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

26.12 Design Time Tools Positioning

The chapter entitled “A Guide to the Android Studio Layout Editor Tool” introduced the concept of the tools namespace and explained how it can be used to set visibility attributes which only take effect within the layout editor. Behind the scenes, Android Studio also uses tools attributes to hold widgets in position when they are placed on the layout without constraints. Imagine, for example, a Button placed onto the layout while autoconnect mode is disabled. While the widget will appear to be in the correct position within the preview canvas, when the app is run it will appear in the top left-hand corner of the screen. This is because the widget has no constraints to tell the ConstraintLayout parent where to position it.

The reason that the widget appears to be in the correct location in the layout editor is because Android Studio has set absolute X and Y positioning tools attributes to keep it in the correct location until constraints...