Book Image

How to Build Android Apps with Kotlin - Second Edition

By : Alex Forrester, Eran Boudjnah, Alexandru Dumbravan, Jomar Tigcal
Book Image

How to Build Android Apps with Kotlin - Second Edition

By: Alex Forrester, Eran Boudjnah, Alexandru Dumbravan, Jomar Tigcal

Overview of this book

Looking to kick-start your app development journey with Android 13, but don’t know where to start? How to Build Android Apps with Kotlin is a comprehensive guide that will help jump-start your Android development practice. This book starts with the fundamentals of app development, enabling you to utilize Android Studio and Kotlin to get started with building Android projects. You'll learn how to create apps and run them on virtual devices through guided exercises. Progressing through the chapters, you'll delve into Android's RecyclerView to make the most of lists, images, and maps, and see how to fetch data from a web service. You'll also get to grips with testing, learning how to keep your architecture clean, understanding how to persist data, and gaining basic knowledge of the dependency injection pattern. Finally, you'll see how to publish your apps on the Google Play store. You'll work on realistic projects that are split up into bitesize exercises and activities, allowing you to challenge yourself in an enjoyable and attainable way. You'll build apps to create quizzes, read news articles, check weather reports, store recipes, retrieve movie information, and remind you where you parked your car. By the end of this book, you'll have the skills and confidence to build your own creative Android applications using Kotlin.
Table of Contents (24 chapters)
1
Part 1: Android Foundation
6
Part 2: Displaying Network Calls
12
Part 3: Testing and Code Structure
17
Part 4: Polishing and Publishing an App

Static fragments and dual-pane layouts

The previous exercise introduced you to static fragments, those that can be defined in the activity XML layout file. You can also create different layouts and resources for different screen sizes. This is used for deciding which resources to display depending on whether the device is a phone or a tablet.

The space for laying out UI elements can increase substantially with a larger size tablet. Android allows specifying different resources depending on many different form factors. The qualifier frequently used to define a tablet in the res (resources) folder is sw600dp.

This states that if the shortest width (sw) of the device is over 600 dp, then use these resources. This qualifier is used for 7” tablets and larger. Tablets facilitate what is known as dual-pane layouts. A pane represents a self-contained part of the user interface. If the screen is large enough, then two panes (dual-pane layouts) can be supported. This also provides...