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 methods 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 (coding) to consider the specific device our app is running on. It is true that some of this preparation can be slightly counterintuitive, but we will go through it a step at...