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?

Cont...

• 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)

 

More on Design

• 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.

More 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?