Key Features of Android How to Program, 2/e

• Android SDK 4.3 and 4.4. We cover various new Android Software Development Kit (SDK) 4.3 and 4.4 features. [Note: The apps in this book are configured to run on Android devices with Android 4.3 and higher; however, most apps will work in 4.0 and higher by changing their minimum required SDK.]

• Fragments. Starting with Chapter 5, we use Fragments to create and manage portions of each app’s GUI. You can combine several fragments to create user interfaces that take advantage of tablet screen sizes. You also can easily interchange fragments to make your GUIs more dynamic, as you’ll do in Chapter 8.

• Support for multiple screen sizes and resolutions. Throughout the app chapters we demonstrate how to use Android’s mechanisms for automatically choosing resources (layouts, images, etc.) based on a device’s size and orientation.

• Eclipse-Based Android Development Tools (ADT) coverage in the print book. The free Android Development Tools (ADT) integrated development environment (IDE)—which includes Eclipse and the ADT plugin—combined with the free Java Development Kit (JDK) provide all the software you’ll need to create, run and debug Android apps, export them for distribution (e.g., upload them to Google Play™) and more.

• Android Studio. This is the preferred IDE for the future of Android app development. Because this IDE is evolving quickly, we put our discussions of it online at:

• Immersive Mode. The status bar at the top of the screen and the menu buttons at the bottom can be hidden, allowing your apps to fill more of the screen. Users can access the status bar by swiping down from the top of the screen, and the system bar (with the back button, home button and recent apps button) by swiping up from the bottom.

• Printing Framework. Android 4.4 KitKat allows you to add printing functionality to your apps, such as locating available printers over Wi-Fi or the cloud, selecting the paper size and specifying which pages to print.

• Testing on Android Smartphones, Tablets and the Android Emulator. For the best app-development experience, you should test your apps on actual Android smartphones and tablets. You can still have a meaningful experience using the Android emulator (see the Before You Begin section), however it’s processor-intensive and can be slow—particularly with games that have a lot of moving parts. In Chapter 1, we mention some Android features that are not supported on the emulator.

• Multimedia. The apps in the print book use a broad range of Android multimedia capabilities, including graphics, images, frame-by-frame animation and audio. The apps in the online chapters use property animation, video, speech synthesis and speech recognition.

• Android Best Practices. We adhere to accepted Android best practices, pointing them out in the detailed code walkthroughs. For more information, visit http://developer.android.com/guide/practices/index.html.

• Java Content in the Appendices Can Be Used With Java SE 6 or Higher.

• Java Exception Handling. We integrate basic exception handling early in the Java content then present a richer treatment in Appendix H; we use exception handling throughout the Android chapters.

• Classes Arrays and ArrayList; Collections. Appendix E covers class Arrays—which contains methods for performing common array manipulations—and generic class ArrayList—which implements a dynamically resizable array-like data structure. Appendix J introduces Java’s generic collections that are used frequently in our Android treatment.

• Java Multithreading. Maintaining app responsiveness is a key to building robust Android apps and requires extensive use of Android multithreading. Appendix J introduces multithreading fundamentals so that you can understand our use of the Android AsyncTask class in Chapter 8.

• GUI Presentation. Appendix I introduces Java GUI development. Android provides its own GUI components, so this appendix presents a few Java GUI components and focuses on nested classes and anonymous inner classes, which are used extensively for event-handling in Android GUIs.