Adam Gerber

Learn Android Studio

L Android Studio covers Android Studio and its rich tools ecosystem, including Git and Gradle: this book covers how Android Studio works seamlessly with Git, for source control, and Gradle, a build and test tool. In addition, this book demonstrates how to develop/collaborate with remote Git web-hosting services such as GitHub and Bitbucket. Four complete Android projects accompany this volume and are available for download from a public Git repository.

Testing and Analyzing

Testing is a critical stage in any software development life cycle. In some shops, the quality assurance team is responsible for writing and maintaining tests, while in others, the development team must carry out this task. In either case, as an application becomes ever more complex, the need for testing becomes ever more important. Testing allows the team members to identify functional problems with the application so that they may proceed with confidence knowing that any changes they make in the source code do not result in runtime errors, erroneous output, and unexpected behavior. Of course, even the most thorough testing cannot eliminate all errors, but testing is the software development teams first line of defense.

More SDK Tools

Android Studio is a special build of IntelliJ IDEA packed with tools geared toward Android development. This chapter explores the various tools you have at your disposal. Many of these are baked into the various tool windows, and others are a mere keystroke away.

Currencies Lab: Part 1

This chapter, as well as the next, shows you how to use Android Studio in the context of building an app called Currencies. The purpose of Currencies is to provide a convenient way to convert between foreign currencies and a user’s home currency. The typical use-case is that a user is travelling abroad and needs to either exchange money or purchase something in a foreign currency. Currency exchange rates are always fluctuating and may even change from one minute to the next, so it’s important that the user have access to the most up-to-date data. The Currencies app fetches the latest exchange rates from a web service hosted by openexchangerates.org.

Introducing Android Studio

This chapter walks you through installing and setting up your development environment so you can follow the examples and labs in this book. First, you will install an essential prerequisite component called the Java Development Kit (JDK). Then you will download and install Android Studio as well as the Android Software Development Kit (SDK), which is a suite of software tools required to build Android apps. We will show you how to use the New Project Wizard to create a simple project called HelloWorld. Last, we will show you how to establish a connection to both an Android Virtual Device (AVD) and a physical Android device. By the end of this chapter, you will have everything you need to start developing apps in Android Studio.

Programming in Android Studio

This chapter covers how to write and generate code in Android Studio. Android Studio uses its knowledge of object-oriented programming to generate extremely relevant and well-formed code. Features covered in this chapter include overriding methods, surrounding statements with Java blocks, using templates to insert code, using auto-completion, commenting code, and moving code. If your goal in reading this book is to master Android Studio, you will want to pay particularly close attention to this chapter because the tools and techniques described herein will have the greatest effect on your programming productivity.

Reminders Lab: Part 2

This chapter covers capturing user input through the use of custom dialog boxes. We also continue to demonstrate the use of adapters and an SQLite database. In this chapter, we complete the lab we began in Chapter 5.

Customizing Android Studio

IntelliJ IDEA, on which Android Studio is based, has been evolving for many years. Part of this evolution is the many customization features that proliferate with each software release. These numerous customizable features, combined with hundreds of third-party plug-ins, make IntelliJ, and now by extension, Android Studio, among the most customizable and flexible IDEs on the market. In fact, almost anything you can imagine being customized in an IDE is customizable in Android Studio. The customizable features in Android Studio are so numerous that we cannot reasonably cover them all. Throughout this book, we’ve already discussed some of the most important customizable features of Android Studio, including tool buttons and default layouts ( Chapter 2), and live templates, code generation, and code styles ( Chapter 3).

Android Wear Lab

Android Wear, one of Google’s latest technology innovations, creates opportunities for much more intimate user experiences. At the time of this writing, only a handful of devices support Android Wear, but the list is growing. Support is currently only for watches, but as the technology matures, wearables could include anything from necklaces to actual clothing. Among these devices are watches from three top manufacturers: Samsung, Motorola, and Sony. In this chapter, you will learn how to build a wearable app that can be deployed and run both wired and wirelessly from Android Studio.

Navigating Android Studio

Android Studio is a windowed environment. To make the best use of limited screen real-estate, and to keep you from being overwhelmed, Android Studio displays only a small fraction of the available windows at any given time. Some of these windows are context-sensitive and appear only when the context is appropriate, while others remain hidden until you decide to show them, or conversely remain visible until you decide to hide them. To take full advantage of Android Studio, you need to understand the functions of these windows, as well as how and when to display them. In this chapter, we’re going to show you how to manage the windows within Android Studio.