Table of Contents
Chapter 1 notes
Installing Android Studio
Installing Android Studio will take a long time and use up a lot of space. Be patient. The first time you run Android Studio, it will download a bunch of stuff. You may get a message that tells you some resource wasn’t installed and then asks you whether you want to retry. In my experience, retrying will succeed.
I've made a video showing the process of installing Android Studio and how long it takes. I don't expect you to watch it, it's just there in case you want a reference. You can see the “retry” error that I've consistently encountered at 15:23.
Once you have successfully created and tested your first Android application, I suggest that you do not update Android Studio or any of the SDK tools for the duration of this course. Updates sometimes break an AVD or change something that breaks your existing projects.
About XML
In this chapter, we pretty much punt our way through the XML parts of a basic Android Project. We’ll use Android’s XML configuration files to a greater extent in subsequent chapters. You don’t need to be an XML expert to write the XML parts of an Android project; but you do need basic XML knowledge.
If you've never been exposed to XML before and want a crash course in it, here are some resources:
- W3School’s XML tutorial, Introduction through Attributes.
- A reasonable tutorial 🎥 by Mark Lassof:
It might help you to know that XML was originally developed for use with Web technologies. It has since been adopted for use in many different situations and is particularly popular in Java culture.
You'll probably have the best results viewing these embedded videos in fullscreen mode or directly on YouTube.
To open a video in YouTube, start playing the video here, then hover over it and click the YouTube logo on the bottom. Once viewing on YouTube, you can set the size and resolution as needed.
p. 8 Creating your first project
p. 16 Some file changes
p. 24 Emulator configuration
p. 27 Running your app in an emulator
p. 33 String resources
When you are done with a project and/or want to start a new one, you can close your project from the menu bar: File > Close project. This will close your project and show you the Android Studio welcome screen. From here you can re-open a project or create a new one.
Appendix III notes
Genymotion alternative emulator