Book Image

Android Studio Arctic Fox Essentials - Kotlin Edition

By : Neil Smyth
Book Image

Android Studio Arctic Fox Essentials - Kotlin Edition

By: Neil Smyth

Overview of this book

Android Studio is an Integrated Development Environment based on the JetBrains IntelliJ IDEA. It offers developers a unique platform to design and develop Android apps using various developer tools. Fully updated for Android Studio Arctic Fox, the goal of this book is to teach the skills necessary to develop Android-based applications using the Kotlin programming language. This book begins with an outline of the steps necessary to set up an Android development and testing environment, followed by an introduction to programming in Kotlin which includes data types, control flow, functions, lambdas, and object-oriented programming. An overview of Android Studio covers areas such as tool windows, the code editor, and the layout editor tool. An introduction to the architecture of Android is followed by an in-depth look at the design of Android applications and user interfaces using the Android Studio environment. Early chapters detail Android architecture components such as view models, lifecycle management, Room database access, the Database Inspector, app navigation, live data, and data binding. More advanced topics such as intents are also covered, as are touch screen handling, gesture recognition, and the recording and playback of audio. This edition of the book also covers printing, transitions, cloud-based file storage, and foldable device support. The concepts of material design are also discussed in detail, including the use of floating action buttons, Snackbars, tabbed interfaces, card views, navigation drawers, and collapsing toolbars. Other key features of Android Studio Arctic Fox and Android taught in this book include the Layout Editor, the ConstraintLayout and ConstraintSet classes, MotionLayout Editor, view binding, constraint chains, barriers, and direct reply to notifications. Chapters also explore more advanced features of Android Studio such as app links, dynamic delivery, Gradle build configuration, and submitting apps to the Google Play developer console.
Table of Contents (93 chapters)
93
Index

50.2 ConstraintLayout to MotionLayout Conversion

As usual, Android Studio will have placed a ConstraintLayout container as the parent view within the activity_main.xml layout file. The next step is to convert this container to a MotionLayout instance. Within the Component Tree, right-click on the ConstraintLayout entry and select the Convert to MotionLayout menu option:

Figure 50-1

After making the selection, click on the Convert button in the confirmation dialog. Once conversion is complete, the MotionLayout editor will appear within the main Android Studio window as illustrated in Figure 50-2:

Figure 50-2

As part of the conversion process, Android Studio will also have created a new folder named res -> xml and placed within it a MotionLayout scene file named activity_main_scene.xml:

Figure 50-3

This file consists of a top level MotionScene element containing the ConstraintSet and Transition entries that will define the animations to be performed...