Android™ App Development Training Course

In this module, you will learn how to create basic user interface in Android. You will learn that there is a declarative (XML-based) as well as programmatic (Java-based) approach to creating Android UI. Additionally, you will learn about activities, one of the most important building blocks for Android apps. You will explore at length the lifecycle of an activity as it is highly managed by the system and is important to understand from performance point of view. Topics in this module include:

• Two ways to create Android UI: XML versus Java approach
• Main view properties: width, height, ids, strings, and more
• Structure of UI: Views and Layouts
• Linear Layout vs. Relative Layout vs. Frame Layout vs. Absolute Layout
• Localization of UI
• Best practices for targeting various form factors: phone, tablet, TV
• Handling UI events: a bit about listeners
• Best practices when working designing Android UI

Your app is a collection of various "screens", implemented as activities. You also may have a few services, and other features that require a button to click to activate. Android offers a standardized method for managing menus and navigation across various components of your app in its Action Bar framework. In this module, you will learn how to use Action Bar to implement navigation in your app. Topics include:

• What Action Bar is
• Enabling the Action Bar
• Removing the Action Bar
• Adding Action Items
• Split Action Bars
• Using the App Icon for Navigation
• Implementing the "Go Home" App Icon Feature
• Implementing "Up" Navigation with the App Icon
• Adding Navigation Tabs
• Adding Drop-down Navigation

Your app often needs to store some user data for future use. For example, it needs to know user's login information for an online service, or other settings. Android framework offers a system for just doing that in form of Preferences. In this module, you will learn how to use preferences within your app. Topics include:

• Overview of preferences
• Preference resource: defining what you'll store locally
• Preference activity: displaying the preference screen
• Reading in the preference values
• Programmatically editing the shared preferences
• Registering for preference changes via a listener
• Filesystem overview: where are the files stored and is it secure

This module introduces some of the advanced UI techniques that will make your user interface, and experience stand out of the rest. Topics include:

• Create activity layouts programmatically
• Incorporate layout resources into a programmatic layout
• Account for a device's screen resolution when programmatically setting screen dimensions
• Designing for performance
• Designing for multiple form factors
• Testing and optimizing UI

An Android application is just a collection of various building blocks. Services are one of the major such blocks. They represent something working in the "background" in your app. By background, we mean it is not visible, but is crucial to the functionality of you app. In this module you will learn what services are, when to use them, how they work, and how to implement them. Topics covered include:

• Overview of Android services
• Service lifecycle
• Declaring a service
• Registering a service
• Starting and stopping a service
• Threads and other concurrency considerations with services
• Bound versus unbound services
• Remote versus local services

Broadcast receivers are Android's publish-subscribe mechanism that. It is an essential part of most Android apps. In this module, you will learn when to use broadcast receivers, how to implement them, as well as register them for intent actions. Topics covered include:

• Broadcast receiver usage patterns: when and why to use them
• Implementing a broadcast receiver
• Registering a broadcast receiver via the manifest file
• Registering a broadcast receiver programmatically

An Android app by default cannot access another app's data. This is the cornerstone of Android security, the principle of sandboxing. But often, you do want an app to share some data with others. Content providers are such an interface to data so that the data cab be mashed together across apps. In this module, you will learn how to design and develop content providers. Topics covered include:

• Why content providers: an overview
• Using existing content providers: creating client code that can read and modify the data managed by a content provider
• Creating a content provider: implementing a basic content provider to expose structured data to other applications
• Intelligent data loading: using loaders to retrieve a Cursor from a content provider without blocking your application's main thread

Android apps often have to deal with data, and frequently large amounts of it as well. Think an email client, opening up a mailbox of tens of thousands of emails. Given that the screen itself is rather small, and network connection often limited, the intelligence of how to efficiently handle large data sets on the screen is crucial to many apps. To help with that, Android offers a number of selection widgets, such as a list view. It also provides for a management of data that such widget display in a form of adapters. In this module, you will learn how to work with Lists and Adapters. Topics covered include:

• Overview of selection widgets
• Working with lists
• Working with adapters
• Implementing a list view and connecting it with an adapter
• Creating custom item views
• Creating custom view bindings

Android runs on variety of devices, from phones with small screen sizes, to tablets and large-screen TV sets. Fragments in a nutshell represent a smaller part of a user interface that could take a whole screen, or be part of a larger UI. By creating and using fragments, your app can adapt to variety of devices and screen sizes. In this module, you will get a solid overview of fragments and will learn how to design them, develop them, and use them both statically and dynamically. Topics covered include:

• What is a fragment: an overview and motivation
• The compatibility package: targeting pre-Honeycomb devices
• Fragment lifecycle
• Creating a fragment class
• Creating a fragment layout
• Statically including fragments in an activity
• Dynamically attaching fragments
• Handling run-time configuration changes
• Retaining Fragments Across Activity Re-Creation
• Using Fragments with no Layouts
• Finding Fragments
• Fragment Operations
• Performing Fragment Transactions
• Managing the Fragment Back Stack
• Integrating Fragment Action Bar/Options Menu Items
• Integrating Fragment Action Bar/Options Menu Items (example)
• Communication Between the Fragment and the Activity
• Best Practices: Loose Coupling of Activities and Fragments
• Best Practices: Define Fragment Interfaces to Invoke Activity Behavior
• Best Practices: The Activity as a Switchboard
• Advanced Fragment Initialization
• Implementing Dialogs Using Fragments
• Using a Fragment-Based Dialog
• Fragment-Based Preference Management
• Additional Fragment Subclasses

Testing is an important part of any app development. There are many facets of testing, such as unit testing, performance, or functional testing. In this module, you will get an overview of various tools that Android supports for testing apps. Topics covered include:

• Testing guidelines: why test and what to test
• JUnit framework: general overview of unit testing and Java's JUnit framework
• Android's unit testing framework: focus on Android JUnit extensions and how to use them to unit test your code
• Using the exercise monkey test tool: pseudo-randomly testing the UI
• Using monkeyrunner tool: scripting functional test cases for your app
• Other testing tools and frameworks: the third-party resources