Exploring the palette – part 1

Let's take a whirlwind tour of some of the previously unexplored and unused items from the palette, and then we can drag a number of them onto a layout and see what useful functions they might have. We can then implement a project to put them all to use.

We have already explored Button and TextView in the previous chapter. Now let's take a closer look at some more widgets alongside them.

The EditText widget

The EditText widget does as its name suggests. If we make an EditText widget available to our users, then they will indeed be able to edit the text in it. We saw this in an earlier chapter, but we didn't achieve anything with it. What we didn't see was how to capture the information from within it, or where we could type this text-capturing code.

The next block of code assumes that we have declared an object of type EditText and have used it to get a reference to an EditText widget in our XML layout. We might write something similar to the following code for...