Chapter 5: The Android Canvas Class – Drawing to the Screen

While we will leave creating our own classes for a few more chapters, our new-found knowledge regarding methods enables us to start taking greater advantage of the classes that Android provides. This entire chapter will be about the Android Canvas class and a number of related classes, including Paint and Color. These classes combined bring great power when it comes to drawing to the screen. Learning about Canvas will also teach us the basics of using any class.

Here is a summary of the topics that will be covered in this chapter:

• Understanding the Canvas class and related classes
• Writing a Canvas-based demo app as practice before moving on to Sub' Hunter
• Looking at the Android coordinate system so we know where to do our drawing
• Drawing some graphics and text for the Sub' Hunter game

Let's get drawing!