Android Training Course

Introduction to Android

A practical session to create a very simple Android App.

• Android and Linux
• Android Architecture
• Activities (Overview)
• Services (Overview)
• Content Providers (Overview)
• Broadcast Receivers (Overview)
• Useful resources

Graphics - 2D and 3D graphics with OpenGL (Overview)

NDK  - What is it?

Third Party Uses

 3rd party library uses

 Open source.

 Augmented reality libraries.

Activities and Fragments

What are they?

The Development Environment

Introducing Android studio and UI tools

Tools for debugging/UI development/testing

Practical Session - Create Hello World in Android Studio

Common Android Design Patterns

Getting Input

Expand hello world - add interaction e.g. Buttons and text boxes

Useful debugging tips.

Code Refactoring - Learn how Android studio can speed up your workflow.

Rapid Development Techniques

Android Interface Development Basics

Declaring Layout

Controls

Menus (Overview)

Dialogs (Overview)

Event Handling (UI)

Feeding back to the User

Design

Looking at design and how that translates into real world Graphical User Interface on Android. Further practical sessions to expand the user interface and allow users to navigate between screens.

Learn how to use Material design in your app.

Common Android Design Patterns

Action Bar

Navigation

Overall design Patterns (Model View Controller), MVVM, MVP

Design Approach

Using Iterative design - design,model,review

Translation Considerations - Designing for German

Android GUI Development - continued

Common Layout Objects - More controls  (Card layout)

How Android Draws Views

Applying Styles and Themes

How to add another screen - new activity

How to pass data to/from it.

Life cycle - i.e what gets called when.

Android Application concepts - how Intents allow app co-operation.

How to handle threads. (UI perspective)

Images and memory gotchas.

List view

Grid View

Custom controls - how to make them usable via xml.

Common Design Patterns

Notifications

Status bar Notifications

App Widgets - how to make one, best practice in updates etc

Using 3rd party libraries to speed up development

Learn how to use the Android build tools (Gradle) to integrate 3rd party open source components into your app.

Dealing With Data

Creating and utilising data sources to populate Android apps - show how to rapidly create a simple test server to prototype an idea and serve as a REST API endpoint.  Examining custom views and how to handle asynchronous tasks to display the data.

Use of 3rd party libraries to make persistence easy (Realm).

Use of 3rd party libraries to make send/retrieval of REST Api’s simple - Retrofit

Common Design Patterns

Allowing Users to sort Data

Users Searching Data

Data Drilling Down

Static and Dynamic lists

More Lists - Custom views.

Content providers

Content Resolvers

Cursors

Data

Persistent data

Data adapters

Use of Realm as a database.

Using Web Services - 

JSON parsing

Http/Https

Asynchronous tasks and threads in Android

Android Volley Http framework

RetroFit - to consume REST api.

Services

Using services, communication and hardware capabilities within Android. Design considerations to keep users informed and allow easy access to app components. The practical session will develop an app populated from a web service.

Services

Using IntentService class

Starting and stopping services.

Bound services

Turn our previous Retrofit based code into a service.

GCM

How to communicate to your user when they’re not in the app. We show how to setup and use Google Cloud Messaging.

Hardware and Communication

Broadcast Receivers - examples.

MultiMedia - camera/video/audio

Contacts - how to use it                      

Completing an Android App, Advanced Techniques and Android Tablets

Examining the remaining Android smartphone features, looking at the differences when developing for a tablet rather than a smartphone and where to go next.

Android GPS / Location

Location-based Service APIs

Android maps

Overlays and Zoom to

App Deployment

Deploying an app to the market.

Understanding AndroidManifest.xml

Security and Permissions

Security best practices

The new Marshmallow (6.0) permissions model.

Android Tablets

Differences in Android phones and Android Tablets

Loaders

Action Bar

Drag and Drop

Future Android Versions and Fragmentation

What it means.

Android compatibility libraries.

Advanced Development

Multi Dex - what is it?