Book Image

Android Studio 3.5 Development Essentials - Kotlin Edition

By : Neil Smyth
Book Image

Android Studio 3.5 Development Essentials - Kotlin Edition

By: Neil Smyth

Overview of this book

Popularity of Kotlin as an Android-compatible language keeps growing every day. This book will help you to build your own Android applications using Kotlin. Android Studio 3.5 Development Essentials Kotlin Edition first teaches you to install Android development and test environment on different operating systems. Next, you will create an Android app and a virtual device in Android studio, and install an Android application on emulators. You will test apps on physical android devices, then study Android Studio code editor, Android architecture, and the anatomy of an Android app. The focus then shifts to Kotlin language. You’ll get an overview of Kotlin language and practice converting code from Java to Kotlin. You’ll also explore Kotlin data types, operators, expressions, loops, functions, and the basics of OOP concept in Kotlin. This book will then cover Android Jetpack and how to create an example app project using ViewModel component, as well as advanced topics such as views and widgets implementation, multi-window support integration, and biometric authentication. Finally, you will learn to upload your app to the Google Play Console and handle the build process with Gradle. By the end of this book, you will have gained enough knowledge to develop powerful Android applications using Kotlin.
Table of Contents (93 chapters)
93
Index

30.3 Setting View Attributes

For the purposes of this exercise, we need the background of the ConstraintLayout view to be blue and the Button view to display text that reads “Press Me” on a yellow background. Both of these tasks can be achieved by setting attributes on the views in the Kotlin code as outlined in the following code fragment. In order to allow the text on the button to be easily translated to other languages it will be added as a String resource. Within the Project tool window, locate the app -> res -> values -> strings.xml file and modify it to add a resource value for the “Press Me” string:

<resources>

    <string name="app_name">KotlinLayout</string>

    <string name="press_me">Press Me</string>

</resources>

Although this is the recommended way to handle strings that are directly referenced in code, to avoid repetition...