Understanding the Canvas class

The Canvas class is part of the android.graphics package. In the next two chapters, we will be using all the following import statements from the android.graphics package and one more from the now familiar View package. They give us access to some powerful drawing functions from the Android API:

import android.graphics.Bitmap
import android.graphics.Canvas
import android.graphics.Color
import android.graphics.Paint
import android.widget.ImageView

First, let's talk about Bitmap, Canvas, and ImageView, as highlighted in the previous code.

Getting started drawing with Bitmap, Canvas, and ImageView

As Android is designed to run all types of mobile apps, we can't immediately start typing our drawing code and expect it to work. We need to do a bit of preparation (that is, more coding) to consider the specific device that our app is running on. It is true that some of this preparation can be slightly counterintuitive, but we will go through this one step...