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Mastering Android Studio 3
Mastering Android Studio 3

Mastering Android Studio 3: Build Dynamic and Robust Android applications

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Mastering Android Studio 3

UI Design

The one feature that stands out in Android Studio above all others, including the Gradle build system, is the powerful User Interface(UI) development tools. The IDE provides a variety of views of our designs, allowing us to combine drag and drop construction and hard code in the development of a UI. Android Studio also comes equipped with a comprehensive preview system, which allows us to test our designs on any manner of device before running the project on an actual device. Along with these features, Android Studio also includes useful support libraries, such as the design library for creating material design layouts and the Percent Support Library for simplifying complex, proportional designs.

This chapter is the first of four, covering UI development. In it, we take a closer look at Studio's Layout Editors and tools. We will be building working interfaces using...

The Layout Editor

If there were only one reason to use Android Studio, it would be the Layout Editor and its associated tools and preview system. The differences are apparent as soon as you open a project. The difference between layout and blueprint view is also shown in the following figure:

The design and blueprint layout views

The blueprint mode is new to Android Studio 2.0 and portrays a simplified, outlined view of our UI. This is particularly useful when it comes to editing the spacing and proportions of complex layouts without the distraction of content. By default, the IDE displays both design and blueprint views side by side, but the editor's own toolbar allows us to view only one, and in most cases one would select the mode most suitable to the task in hand.

The B key can be used to toggle between design, blueprint, and combined views as an alternative to the toolbar...

The constraint layout

The constraint layout is similar to the relative layout, in that it allows us to generate complex layouts without having to create memory sapping, view group hierarchies. Android Studio makes creating such layouts far easier, because it provides a visual editor that enables us to drag and drop not only screen components, but also their connections. Being able to experiment with layout structures so easily provides us with a great sandbox environment to develop new layouts.

The following exercise will take you through the process of installing the constraint library so that you can begin experimenting yourself.

  1. As of Android Studio 3.0 the ConstraintLayout is downloaded by default, but if you want to update an earlier project, you will need to open the SDK manager. The ConstraintLayout and constraint solver can both be found under the SDK Tools tab, as follows...

Multiple screen previewing

One of the most interesting challenges an Android developer faces is the bewildering number of devices that employ it. Everything from wristwatches to widescreen televisions. It is rare that we would want to develop a single application to run across such a range, but even developing layouts for all mobile phones is still a daunting task.

Fortunately, this process is aided by the way the SDK allows us to categorize features such as screen shape, size, and density into broader groups. Android Studio adds another powerful UI development tool, in the form of a complex preview system. This can be used to preview many popular device configurations as well as allowing us to create custom configurations.

In the previous section, we took a look at the ConstraintLayout toolbar, but as you will have noticed, there is a more generic design editor toolbar:

Design...

Summary

In this chapter, we covered the fundamentals of interface development, and this is largely a matter of using and understanding the various layout types. A lot of the chapter was devoted to the constraint layout as this is the latest and most flexible of these viewgroups and is catered for fully in Android Studio with intuitive visual tools.

The chapter concluded by seeing how we take the completed layouts and view them on an emulator using a customized hardware profile.

In the following chapter, we will look more deeply into these layouts and see how the coordinator layout is used to coordinate a number of child components to work together with very little coding required from us.

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Key benefits

  • Use Android Studio not just as an IDE but as a complete testing and build solution
  • Produce customized APKs with Gradle to suit various versions of an app, such as test versions and free versions of an otherwise paid app.
  • Explore all aspects of UI development and testing using working XML and Java examples.
  • Learn seamless migration from Eclipse and other development platforms to Android Studio.

Description

Android Studio is an Integrated Development Environment (IDE) designed for developing Android apps. As with most development processes, Android keeps resources and logic nicely separated, and so this book covers the management of imagery and other resources, and the development and testing tools provided by the IDE. After introducing the software, the book moves straight into UI development using the sophisticated, WYSIWYG layout editor and XML code to design and test complex interfaces for a wide variety of screen configurations. With activity design covered, the book continues to guide the reader through application logic development, exploring the latest APIs provided by the SDK. Each topic will be demonstrated by working code samples that can be run on a device or emulator. One of Android Studio's greatest features is the large number of third-party plugins available for it, and throughout the book we will be exploring the most useful of these, along with samples and libraries that can be found on GitHub. The final module of the book deals with the final stages of development: building and distribution. The book concludes by taking the reader through the registration and publication processes required by Google. By the time you have finished the book, you will be able to build faster, smoother, and error-free Android applications, in less time and with fewer complications than you ever thought possible.

Who is this book for?

This book targets developers, with experience of developing for Android, who are new to Android Studio or wish to migrate from another IDE such as Eclipse. This book will show you how to get the utmost from this powerful tool.

What you will learn

  • Create styles, themes, and material designs
  • Set up, configure, and run virtual devices using the AVD manager
  • Improve the design of your application using support libraries
  • Learn about GitHub libraries
  • Use emulators to design layouts for a wide variety of devices, including wearables.
  • Improve application performance in terms of memory, speed, and power usage
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Publication date : Aug 31, 2017
Length: 220 pages
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Language : English
ISBN-13 : 9781786467447
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Length: 220 pages
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ISBN-13 : 9781786467447
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Table of Contents

9 Chapters
Workspace Structure Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
UI Design Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
UI Development Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Device Development Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Assets and Resources Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Templates and Plugins Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Language Support Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Testing and Profiling Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Packaging and Distribution Chevron down icon Chevron up icon

Customer reviews

Rating distribution
Full star icon Full star icon Half star icon Empty star icon Empty star icon 2.5
(2 Ratings)
5 star 0%
4 star 0%
3 star 50%
2 star 50%
1 star 0%
Subhrangshu A. Dec 26, 2018
Full star icon Full star icon Empty star icon Empty star icon Empty star icon 2
Not so cool. Same company's hands on c++ gui programming with qt5 was much better. Because of that, I bought this book. This ones real dissapointment. Covers only the stuffs that you yourself can navigate android studio and learn everything covered in this book in 15 minutes.
Amazon Verified review Amazon
Purushothaman I V Jul 31, 2018
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Yes
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