Wednesday, December 28, 2016

Android Design Patterns and Best Practice

Android Design Patterns and Best Practice

Key Features

  • Create efficient object interaction patterns for faster and more efficient Android development
  • Get into efficient and fast app development and start making money from your android apps
  • Implement industry-standard design patterns and best practices to reduce your app development time drastically

Book Description
Are you an Android developer with some experience under your belt? Are you wondering how the experts create efficient and good-looking apps? Then your wait will end with this book! We will teach you about different Android development patterns that will enable you to write clean code and make your app stand out from the crowd.

The book starts by introducing the Android development environment and exploring the support libraries. You will gradually explore the different design and layout patterns and get to know the best practices of how to use them together. Then you'll then develop an application that will help you grasp activities, services, and broadcasts and their roles in Android development.

Moving on, you will add user-detecting classes and APIs such as gesture detection, touch screen listeners, and sensors to your app. You will also learn to adapt your app to run on tablets and other devices and platforms, including Android Wear, auto, and TV. Finally, you will see how to connect your app to social media and explore deployment patterns as well as the best publishing and monetizing practices.

The book will start by introducing the Android development environment and exploring the support libraries. You will gradually explore the different Design and layout patterns and learn the best practices on how to use them together. You will then develop an application that will help you grasp Activities, Services and Broadcasts and their roles in Android development. Moving on, you will add user detecting classes and APIs such as at gesture detection, touch screen listeners and sensors to our app. You will also learn to adapt your app to run on tablets and other devices and platforms, including Android Wear, Auto, and TV. Finally, you will learn to connect your app to social media and explore deployment patterns and best publishing and monetizing practices.

What you will learn

  • Build a simple app and run it on real and emulated devices
  • Explore the WYSIWYG and XML approaches to material design provided within Android Studio
  • Detect user activities by using touch screen listeners, gesture detection, and reading sensors
  • Apply transitions and shared elements to employ elegant animations and efficiently use the minimal screen space of mobile devices
  • Develop apps that automatically apply the best layouts for different devices by using designated directories
  • Socialize in the digital word by connecting your app to social media
  • Make your apps available to the largest possible audience with the AppCompat support library

About the Author
Kyle Mew has been programming since the early eighties and has written for several technology websites. He has also written three radio plays and three other books on Android development.

Table of Contents

  1. Design Patterns
  2. Creational Patterns
  3. Material Patterns
  4. Layout Patterns
  5. Structural Patterns
  6. Activating Patterns
  7. Combining Patterns
  8. Composing Patterns
  9. Observing Patterns
  10. Behavioral Patterns
  11. Wearable Patterns
  12. Social Patterns
  13. Distribution Patterns


Monday, December 26, 2016

Beginning Android Games 3rd Edition

Beginning Android Games

Learn all of the basics needed to join the ranks of successful Android game developers. You'll start with game design fundamentals and Android programming basics, and then progress toward creating your own basic game engine and playable game apps that work on Android smartphones and tablets. Beginning Android Games, Third Edition gives you everything you need to branch out and write your own Android games for a variety of hardware.

Do you have an awesome idea for the next break-through mobile gaming title? Beginning Android Games will help you kick-start your project. This book will guide you through the process of making several example game apps using APIs available in Android.

What You'll Learn
  • Gain the fundamentals of game programming in the context of the Android platform
  • Use Android's APIs for graphics, audio, and user input to reflect those fundamentals
  • Develop two 2D games from scratch, based on Canvas API and OpenGL ES
  • Create a full-featured 3D game
  • Publish your games, get crash reports, and support your users
  • Complete your own playable 2D OpenGL games
Who This Book Is For
People with a basic knowledge of Java who want to write games on the Android platform. It also offers information for experienced game developers about the pitfalls and peculiarities of the platform.

Friday, December 16, 2016

Android Recipes: A Problem-Solution Approach 5th Edition

Discover more than 100 down-to-earth code recipes, covering a wide range of useful topics using complete and real-world working code examples. This book is updated to include the Android N SDK (7.0), as well as earlier releases.

Android Recipes: A Problem-Solution Approach

Crammed with insightful instruction and helpful examples, this fifth edition of Android Recipes is your guide to writing apps for one of today’s hottest mobile platforms. It offers pragmatic advice that will help you get the job done quickly and well. This can save you a great deal of work over creating a project from scratch.

Instead of abstract descriptions of complex concepts, in Android Recipes you'll find live code examples. When you start a new project you can consider copying and pasting the code and configuration files from this book and then modifying them for your own customization needs.

What You'll Learn

  • Code for Android smartphones and tablets
  • Use external libraries to save time and effort
  • Boost app performance by using the Android NDK and RenderScript
  • Design apps for performance, responsiveness, and seamlessness
  • Send data between devices and other external hardware
  • Persist application data and share it between applications
  • Capture and play back various device media items
  • Communicate with web services
  • Get the most out of your user interface

Who This Book Is For
All Android app developers.

Tuesday, December 13, 2016

Google’s Internet of Things platform: Android Things and Weave

Google announced updates to Google’s Internet of Things platform: Android Things and Weave, to know the details, refer Announcing updates to Google’s Internet of Things platform: Android Things and Weave


To get started, check out Google's IoT developer site, or go directly to the Android Things, Weave, and Google Cloud Platform sites for documentation and code samples. You can also join Google's IoT Developers Community on Google+ to get the latest updates and share and discuss ideas with other developers.


Sunday, December 11, 2016

Mastering Android Wear Application Development

Master the future of mobile devices in wearable technology

Mastering Android Wear Application Development

About This Book
  • Mastering Android Wear Development is a complete guide to wearable technology for experienced Android developers
  • Notifications, voice input, coping with round screens – all the key challenges of wearable technology are covered
  • This book describes not just how to write code for wearables, but also how to think about wearable technology and design apps that work well with the physical limitations of wearable devices
Who This Book Is For
This book is for application developers (the web, mobile, and desktop) who are interested in building new wearable apps, and mobile developers who already have apps on iTunes or Google Play Store and are looking to provide Android Wear support for their existing Android or iOS apps.

What You Will Learn
  • Understand the Wearable computing technology
  • Set up a development environment to build Android Wear apps using Android Studio
  • Master the Android Wear SDK and APIs
  • Understand the UI patterns and UX principles to build Android Wear apps
  • Work with the different form factors of wearable devices (round and square)
  • Take advantage of the sensors available on Android Wear devices
  • Develop Android Wear sample apps
  • Communicate between Android mobile and Android Wear apps
  • Get to know the steps involved in publishing Android Wear apps to the Play store
In Detail
Wearable technology is the future of mobile devices. It looks set to be a breakthrough technology, just like the iPad was before it. With the Apple Watch being widely regarded as a success, all eyes are now on Google to provide a similar device for its users. Keep your skills ahead of the competition and be one of the first to fully understand this powerful new trend. This book will give you a very solid understanding of the philosophy, thought process, development details, and methodologies involved in building well-designed, robust Android Wear applications.

We cover the advantages and disadvantages of the wearable computing paradigm and provide a good foundational knowledge for you to build practical, real-world wearable apps. You will learn about the various tools, platforms, libraries, SDKs, and technology needed to build Android Wear apps. By the end of the book, you will be an expert in building Android wearable apps.

Style and approach
This one-stop professional tutorial will teach you everything you need to know to begin designing and developing applications for this exciting new technology. Every step from development through testing to deployment is explained in depth.