amartyashankha / meet_2016-17_ap_android

Android App Development Advanced project guide for MEET 2016-2017

MEET_2016-17_AP_Android

Android App Development Advanced project guide for MEET 2016-2017

We will be following the Udacity course at https://www.udacity.com/course/new-android-fundamentals--ud851. Go ahead and create an account on Udacity and check out the material.

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Download Nerd Ranch Guide. Install fbreader and open the epub file.

sudo apt-get install fbreader && fbreader BNR.epub

Java guide for Python programmers

##Installing Android SDK

Begin by downloading Android Studio. and then follow the installation instructions in https://developer.android.com/studio/install.html to install the SDK.

Note: You will need to install some packages first. On Ubuntu, run in the terminal.

sudo apt-get install libc6:i386 libncurses5:i386 libstdc++6:i386 lib32z1 libbz2-1.0:i386

##Getting Started

The first few lectures (under first lesson Create Project Sunshine) in the course are just basic overview and an introduction to Git. Feel free to skip ahead to Creating our First project. You should go through the material up to lecture 9 Running your Code.

Objective: By the end of this section, you should have a simple app running on your emulator.

##Views and Layouts

Exercise Update layout : Either through Design or Text Start watching the following lectures

• Lecture 12 -- Activities, Packages, and Layouts
• Lecture 14 -- Android Layouts Primer
• Lecture 19 -- Visual Layout Editor

Now you should be able to complete the five Exercises in this section. The final two (Update Sunshine layout and Add Scrolling Weather) are the more important ones. Make sure to test your apps on the emulator.

Exercise Scrolling Weather : Use dummy list of data. Get reference to the TextView in onCreate. Loop through data, and add each entry to text view with blank lines in between. After the final exercise, you should be able to scroll through a list of your dummy data.

Objective: By the end of this section, you should be able to manipulate the basic View elements and create custom Layouts. 

##Listeners and Toasts

For this section we will create a new app. You should refer to the Nerd Ranch Guide Chapter 1. You have already seen how to create a basic application and add UI elements. The first steps are to create a basic layout. You can customize this and make it more elaborate if you want. Pay special attention to the section on Creating String Resources. After this, you will set IDs for each of your UI elements (in Resources and Resource IDs). As before, you will use these IDs to reference View objects later on.

The next section (Wiring up Widgets) shows you how to get the references to the Buttons and then elaborates how to set up listeners for click events from the buttons. Finally, complete the section on Toasts and you should have a working app with a single quiz question.

Learning Outcomes

• Creating and Using String Resources
• Creating and Using Resource IDs as references
• Setting up OnClick listeners.
• Using Toasts

##Dynamic Views (Model-View-Controller)

In this section we will be covering the material in the Nerd Ranch Guide Chapter 2 up to Updating the Controller View. You will continue to work on the quiz app by adding more questions. The objective is to update the view so that it displays a new question upon pressing a Next button.

##Activity Lifecycle In order to understand the basics of Activity lifecycles, watch the first four lectures in the lifecycle section of the Udacity course.

• Introduction
• Why we Need ...
• Android Activity lifecycle
• Reto

##Adding more Activities

Now, we will go through Chapter 5 of the Nerd Wranch Guide. Here, you will learn how to add more activities to your app. Specifically, we will add a Cheat button to your quiz app from two sections ago. This will provide the answer to a question on a new page (Activity). To accomplish this, you must first create a new activity for the cheat page and construct the views for it.

Next, you should go thorough the sections Starting an Activity and Passing Data between Activities. These sections elaborate how to start new activities using Intents, and how to communicate and pass data between them using Intent Extras.

##Advanced Layout (More Practice with Listeners) This section is optional, but will gie you a good introduction to using UI fragments. You will also use more listeners to update objects in your program.

You can feel free to skip ahead to the next section which will use this code. This code can be found in the AdvancedLayout folder. If you choose to not write it yourself, you should at least read through and understand how the UI is set up, how it is updated in thejava code, and how the listners are used to change the Crime object values.

In this section we will create the basic UI fragment for the Criminal Intent App. You should follow the directions in the BNR Guide Chapters 7 and 8. In Chapter 7, you wil create the very basic UI fragment, and use a text listener to update a value in the Crime object. In the following chapter, you will add more elements to the UI fragment, and set up more listeners corresponding to additional fields in the Crime object.

##Recycler View For this section, we will continue working on the Criminal Intent App. If you skipped the previous section, the code can be found in the AdvancedLayout folder.

Go through Chapter 9 of the Big Nerd Ranch Guide. First you will create some basic View Holder sand adapters and use these to populate a scrolling Recycler View. Make sure you understand why we need aRecycler View rather than just loading all the indivivual View objects into memory. Also, note how the Recycler View uses the View Holders and Adapters.

Objective: By the end of this section, you should be able to create View Holders and Adapters, and work with Recycler Views.

##HTTP Requests and JSON In this section we will go back to the Udacity course and resume working on the Sunshine App. You will learn how to make HTTP requests to get weather data from the internet in JSON format, Yu will also learn to parse the JSON data and display it in the app.

###Making an HTTP Request Watch the two lectures Making an HTTP Request and Permissions. After this, do the Exercise on Connecting to the Internet.

###Using AsyncTask The previous method fails because you cannot make a network request on the main thread. Watch the lectures on Thread Basics and AsyncTasks. Now, use this new framework to complete the Exercise.

Optional : Clean up your App by going through the Exercise on Polish.

###JSON format The data from github is a long string of JSON format data. Watch the lecture on JSON Format. There are many resources to understand JSOn online. For example. For the final exercise, you will have to parse the incoming JSON weather data to display in your app.

The most important Exercise for this section uses HTTP requests to get weather data from the internet and populate our scrolling list. As before, you can optionally add polish to your app.

##SQLite Databases