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Android Application Development Cookbook

Android Application Development Cookbook

By : Boyer, Mew
4.5 (6)
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Android Application Development Cookbook

Android Application Development Cookbook

4.5 (6)
By: Boyer, Mew

Overview of this book

The Android OS has the largest installation base of any operating system in the world; there has never been a better time to learn Android development to write your own applications, or to make your own contributions to the open source community! This “cookbook” will make it easy for you to jump to a topic of interest and get what you need to implement the feature in your own application. If you are new to Android and learn best by “doing,” then this book will provide many topics of interest. Starting with the basics of Android development, we move on to more advanced concepts, and we’ll guide you through common tasks developers struggle to solve. The first few chapters cover the basics including Activities, Layouts, Widgets, and the Menu. From there, we cover fragments and data storage (including SQLite), device sensors, the camera, and GPS. Then we move on more advanced topics such as graphics and animation (including OpenGL), multi-threading with AsyncTask, and Internet functionality with Volley. We’ll also demonstrate Google Maps and Google Cloud Messaging (also known as Push Notifications) using the Google API Library. Finally, we’ll take a look at several online services designed especially for Android development. Take your application big-time with full Internet web services without having to become a server admin by leveraging the power of Backend as a Service (BaaS) providers.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
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Preface
Preface
What this book covers
What you need for this book
Who this book is for
Sections
Conventions
Reader feedback
Customer support
Free Chapter
1
1. Activities
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1. Activities
Introduction
Declaring an activity
Starting a new activity with an intent object
Switching between activities
Passing data to another activity
Returning a result from an activity
Saving an activity's state
Storing persistent activity data
Understanding the activity lifecycle
2
2. Layouts
2. Layouts
Introduction
Defining and inflating a layout
Using RelativeLayout
Using LinearLayout
Creating tables – TableLayout and GridLayout
Using ListView, GridView, and Adapters
Changing layout properties during runtime
Optimizing layouts with the Hierarchy Viewer
3
3. Views, Widgets, and Styles
3. Views, Widgets, and Styles
Introduction
Inserting a widget into a layout
Using graphics to show button state
Creating a widget at runtime
Creating a custom component
Applying a style to a View
Turning a style into a theme
Selecting theme based on the Android version
4
4. Menus
4. Menus
Introduction
Creating an Options menu
Modifying menus and menu items during runtime
Enabling Contextual Action Mode for a view
Using Contextual Batch Mode with a ListView
Creating a pop-up menu
5
5. Exploring Fragments, AppWidgets, and the System UI
5. Exploring Fragments, AppWidgets, and the System UI
Introduction
Creating and using a Fragment
Adding and removing Fragments during runtime
Passing data between Fragments
Creating a shortcut on the Home screen
Creating a Home screen widget
Adding Search to the Action Bar
Showing your app full screen
6
6. Working with Data
6. Working with Data
Introduction
Storing simple data
Read and write a text file to internal storage
Read and write a text file to external storage
Including resource files in your project
Creating and using an SQLite database
Access data in the background using a Loader
7
7. Alerts and Notifications
7. Alerts and Notifications
Introduction
Lights, Action, and Sound – getting the user's attention!
Creating a Toast using a custom layout
Displaying a message box with AlertDialog
Displaying a progress dialog
Lights, Action, and Sound Redux using Notifications
Creating a Media Player Notification
Making a Flashlight with a Heads-Up Notification
8
8. Using the Touchscreen and Sensors
8. Using the Touchscreen and Sensors
Introduction
Listening for click and long-press events
Recognizing tap and other common gestures
Pinch-to-zoom with multi-touch gestures
Swipe-to-Refresh
Listing available sensors – an introduction to the Android Sensor Framework
Reading sensor data – using the Android Sensor Framework events
Reading device orientation
9
9. Graphics and Animation
9. Graphics and Animation
Introduction
Scaling down large images to avoid Out of Memory exceptions
A transition animation – defining scenes and applying a transition
Creating a Compass using sensor data and RotateAnimation
Creating a slideshow with ViewPager
Creating a Card Flip Animation with Fragments
Creating a Zoom Animation with a Custom Transition
10
10. A First Look at OpenGL ES
10. A First Look at OpenGL ES
Introduction
Set up the OpenGL ES environment
Drawing shapes on GLSurfaceView
Applying Projection and Camera View while drawing
Moving the triangle with rotation
Rotating the triangle with user input
11
11. Multimedia
11. Multimedia
Introduction
Playing sound effects with SoundPool
Playing audio with MediaPlayer
Responding to hardware media controls in your app
Taking a photo with the default camera app
Taking a picture using the (old) Camera API
Taking a picture using the Camera2 (the new) API
12
12. Telephony, Networks, and the Web
12. Telephony, Networks, and the Web
Introduction
How to make a phone call
Monitoring phone call events
How to send SMS (text) messages
Receiving SMS messages
Displaying a web page in your application
Checking online status and connection type
Getting started with Volley for Internet requests
Canceling a Volley request
Using Volley to request a JSON response
Using Volley to request an image
Using Volley's NetworkImageView and ImageLoader
13
13. Getting Location and Using Geofencing
13. Getting Location and Using Geofencing
Introduction
How to get the last location
Resolving problems reported with the GoogleApiClient OnConnectionFailedListener
How to receive location updates
Create and monitor a Geofence
14
14. Getting your app ready for the Play Store
14. Getting your app ready for the Play Store
Introduction
The new Android 6.0 Run-Time permission model
How to schedule an alarm
Receive notification of device boot
Using the AsyncTask for background work
Adding speech recognition to your app
Push Notification using GCM
How to add Google sign-in to your app
15
15. The Backend as a Service Options
15. The Backend as a Service Options
Introduction
App42
Backendless
Buddy
Firebase
Kinvey
16
Index
Index

Storing persistent activity data

Being able to store information about our activities on a temporary basis is very useful, but more often than not, we will want our application to remember information across multiple sessions.

Android supports SQLite, but that could be a lot of overhead for simple data, such as the user's name or a high score. Fortunately, Android also provides a lightweight option for these scenarios, with SharedPreferences.

Getting ready

You can either use the project from the previous recipe or start a new project and call it PersistentData (in a real-world application, you'll likely be doing both anyway). In the previous recipe, we saved mCounter in the session state. In this recipe, we'll add a new method to handle onPause() and save mCounter to SharedPreferences. We'll restore the value in onCreate().

How to do it...

We have only two changes to make, and both are in MainActivity.java:

  1. Add the following onPause() method to save the data before the activity closes:
    @Override
protected void onPause() {
    super.onPause();

    SharedPreferences settings = getPreferences(MODE_PRIVATE);
    SharedPreferences.Editor editor = settings.edit();
    editor.putInt(KEY_COUNTER, mCounter);
    editor.commit();
}
  2. Then add the following code at the end of onCreate() to restore the counter:
    SharedPreferences settings = getPreferences(MODE_PRIVATE);

int defaultCounter = 0;
mCounter = settings.getInt(KEY_COUNTER, defaultCounter);
  3. Run the program and try it out.

How it works...

As you can see, this is very similar to saving state data, because it also uses name/value pairs. Here, we just stored an int, but we can just as easily store one of the other primitive data types. Each data type has equivalent getters and setters, for example, SharedPreferences.getBoolean() or SharedPreferences.setString().

Saving our data requires the services of SharedPreferences.Editor. This is evoked with edit() and accepts remove() and clear() procedures as well as setters such as putInt(). Note that we must conclude any storing that we do here with the commit() statement.

There's more...

There is a slightly more sophisticated variant of the getPreferences() accessor: getSharedPreferences(). It can be used to store multiple preference sets.

Using more than one preference file

Using getSharedPreferences() is no different from using its counterpart, but it allows for more than one preference file. It takes the following form:

getSharedPreferences(String name, int mode)

Here, name is the file. The mode can be either MODE_PRIVATE, MODE_WORLD_READABLE, or MODE_WORLD_WRITABLE and describes the file's access levels.

See also

  • Chapter 6, Working with Data, for more examples on data storage
End of Section 9
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