Chapter 3. Common Components

With software installed and a grounding in the principles of Android layout design, we are now in a position to explore the components that make up mobile applications and the material rules that govern their appearance. This chapter covers some of the most common visual components, dialogs, and menus.

After selecting a material-compliant palette, we revisit the toolbar, again using it to replace the old action bar, which is itself a member of the menu family. The Asset Studio is then used to select and configure suitable material icons to represent our menu items and the layout guidelines for phones, tablets, and desktops, which are detailed. The chapter then moves on to actual menus and we construct both the overflow and contextual varieties along with the Java routines required to capture menu events.

This chapter starts to delve further into the code required to develop Android applications. This will involve both XML and Java, although XML is our...