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

30. Managing Constraints using Constraint Sets

Up until this point in the book, all user interface design tasks have been performed using the Android Studio Layout Editor tool, either in text or design mode. An alternative to writing XML resource files or using the Android Studio Layout Editor is to write Kotlin code to directly create, configure and manipulate the view objects that comprise the user interface of an Android activity. Within the context of this chapter, we will explore some of the advantages and disadvantages of writing Kotlin code to create a user interface before describing some of the key concepts such as view properties and the creation and management of layout constraints.

In the next chapter, an example project will be created and used to demonstrate some of the typical steps involved in this approach to Android user interface creation.