Activity is the main android component which displays user interface, handles user events and provide behavior. Each screen of an app is associated with an activity. An activity can exist in different states and has life cycle. Android system calls callback methods of an activity depending on the state change.
A drawable resource represents a graphic file or xml drawable file that can be drawn on screen. In Android, these files are stored in res/drawable folder.
In Android, shape drawables can be defined in xml which can be used as resources in java code and xml to set image related attributes such as background, icon, etc of views. You can define rectangle, oval, ring, and line shape drawables in xml.
Using Android color state list, different colors can be applied to Android widgets depending on applicable states such as pressed, focused, selected, checkable, checked and enabled.
Every application contains code and resources. While code provides behavior of applications, resources are static which either provide configuration information to behavior or are displayed in UI. Examples of application resources are images, text values, xml, audio and video files, fonts, color definitions, menus, animation, and user interface layouts.
Since Android system supports multiple languages and allows user to choose language or locale, displaying your app content or resource based on the chosen locale allows users to view your app’s text content in user preferred language and to experience other content in a way that reflects the culture of the selected locale.
In this post, you can learn how to use data binding library to bind event handler and data model object properties to views in the item layout of RecyclerView.
Android provides data binding library that helps in creating apps with less glue code to bind application logic and layouts. With data binding, you don’t need to find views in activities or fragments, set view attributes to properties of data model object and add event handlers to views, all this is taken care of by data binding framework using the data binding component classes and data binding expressions that you define in layouts.
Picture in picture support, introduced in Android 8.0 API level 26 and uses multi window APIs, allows you to develop a feature in your app which lets users to view an activity in a small window pinned to a corner while users can do something on the main screen.
In this post, you can learn how to use Google places API to get a list of photos associated to a selected place and display them in your app.
In this post, you can learn how to create place search functionality in your app using Autocomplete service which is available as part of Google places API. Place search functionality can be implemented using Autocomplet UI wizard or by creating custom auto complete component, this post covers both.
In this post, you can learn how to use PlacePicker UI widget with place notes example Android app. PlacePicker UI widget displays places near a location on Google map and allows user to select a place.