Book Image

Android Design Patterns and Best Practice

By : Kyle Mew
Book Image

Android Design Patterns and Best Practice

By: Kyle Mew

Overview of this book

Are you an Android developer with some experience under your belt? Are you wondering how the experts create efficient and good-looking apps? Then your wait will end with this book! We will teach you about different Android development patterns that will enable you to write clean code and make your app stand out from the crowd. The book starts by introducing the Android development environment and exploring the support libraries. You will gradually explore the different design and layout patterns and get to know the best practices of how to use them together. Then you’ll then develop an application that will help you grasp activities, services, and broadcasts and their roles in Android development. Moving on, you will add user-detecting classes and APIs such as gesture detection, touch screen listeners, and sensors to your app. You will also learn to adapt your app to run on tablets and other devices and platforms, including Android Wear, auto, and TV. Finally, you will see how to connect your app to social media and explore deployment patterns as well as the best publishing and monetizing practices. The book will start by introducing the Android development environment and exploring the support libraries. You will gradually explore the different Design and layout patterns and learn the best practices on how to use them together. You will then develop an application that will help you grasp Activities, Services and Broadcasts and their roles in Android development. Moving on, you will add user detecting classes and APIs such as at gesture detection, touch screen listeners and sensors to our app. You will also learn to adapt your app to run on tablets and other devices and platforms, including Android Wear, Auto, and TV. Finally, you will learn to connect your app to social media and explore deployment patterns and best publishing and monetizing practices.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
Android Design Patterns and Best Practice
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface

Creating a card view


The card view is one of the most recognizable material design components. It is designed to show several pieces of content that all apply to a single subject. This content is usually a combination of graphics, text, action buttons, and icons, and cards are a great way to present a selection of choices in a uniform way. This makes it a good choice for displaying our sandwich ingredients and related information such as price or calorific value. We will use the factory pattern from the previous chapter to do this, but before we see what code needs changing, let's take a look at how we implement the card view in the first place.

Understanding card view properties

If your minimum target SDK is 21 or greater, then the CardView widget will be included as standard. Otherwise, you will need to include the cardview support library. This is easily added in the build.gradle file by including the following highlighted line:

dependencies { 
    compile fileTree(dir: 'libs', include...