Book Image

Android Studio 4.2 Development Essentials - Java Edition

By : Neil Smyth
Book Image

Android Studio 4.2 Development Essentials - Java Edition

By: Neil Smyth

Overview of this book

Android Studio is an Integrated Development Environment based on the JetBrains IntelliJ IDEA. It provides developers with a unique platform to design and develop Android apps using various developer tools. The new Android Studio 4.2 has an upgraded IntelliJ platform and a variety of new features designed to improve the productivity of Android app developers. Fully updated for Android Studio 4.2, the objective of this book is to help you master the skills necessary to develop Android applications using Java as the programming language. This book begins by outlining the steps necessary to set up an Android development and testing environment and introducing programming in Java, describing data types, flow control, functions, lambdas, and object-oriented programming. It includes an overview of Android Studio, covering areas such as tool windows, the code editor, and the Layout Editor tool. An introduction to Android architecture is followed by an in-depth explanation of the design of Android applications and user interfaces using the Android Studio environment. Early chapters detail Android Architecture components like view models, lifecycle management, Room database access, the Database Inspector, app navigation, live data, and data binding. Advanced topics such as intents are also covered, as are touch screen handling, gesture recognition, and the recording and playback of audio. You will also explore printing, transitions, cloud-based file storage, and foldable device support. Detailed descriptions of the concepts of material design are provided, including the use of floating action buttons, Snackbars, tabbed interfaces, card views, navigation drawers, and collapsing toolbars. Some key features of Android Studio 4.2 and Android discussed in-depth include the Layout Editor, the ConstraintLayout and ConstraintSet classes, MotionLayout Editor, view binding, constraint chains, barriers, and direct reply notifications. Later chapters cover advanced features of Android Studio such as App Links, Dynamic Delivery, the Android Studio Profiler, Gradle build configuration, and submitting apps to the Google Play Developer Console.
Table of Contents (87 chapters)
87
Index

75.6 Understanding Geocoding and Reverse Geocoding

It is impossible to talk about maps and geographical locations without first covering the subject of Geocoding. Geocoding can best be described as the process of converting a textual based geographical location (such as a street address) into geographical coordinates expressed in terms of longitude and latitude.

Geocoding can be achieved using the Android Geocoder class. An instance of the Geocoder class can, for example, be passed a string representing a location such as a city name, street address or airport code. The Geocoder will attempt to find a match for the location and return a list of Address objects that potentially match the location string, ranked in order with the closest match at position 0 in the list. A variety of information can then be extracted from the Address objects, including the longitude and latitude of the potential matches.

The following code, for example, requests the location of the National Air...