Unit 1 The Basics

• ● Hello World: Intro to Android
• Why develop apps for Android?
• Flavors of Android operating systems
• Challenges of developing for Android (multiple OS, need backwards compatibility
• need to consider performance and offline capability) ● Concept: Create Your First Android App: Overview of the development process - Java
• Android Studio
• Project layout in Android Studio
• Target and minimum SDKs
• Android Virtual Device (AVD) Monitor
• Viewing logs in logcat and AVD, Android manifest file
• App Architecture: An app consists of one or more activities
• For an activity
• write Java code and layout xml, and hook them together, and register the activity in the manifest file. ● Concept: Layouts
• Views and Resources: Layout elements can be viewed and edited in Layout Editor and XML, Introduction to the range of UI elements
• Resources (layouts
• Identifying 10 resources with IDs, Programmatically referencing resources using resource IDs, on Click attribute
• Getting user input from a view
• Programmatically changing UI elements
• Layout Managers
• Defining layouts for activities
• inflating the layout. ● Concept: Scrolling Views: How to make activities scrollable: compare ScrollView
• Getting the resource ID for a UI element by inflating a layout (needed for RecyclerView)
• How to implement RecyclerView (requires layout managers and ViewHolders)
• Performance impications of different kinds of scrolling UI elements ● Concept: Resources to Help You Learn: Resources to help you learn: Samples that ship with the SDK, Templates for projects
• Android developer blog
• Android developer YouTube channel
• Source code and samples in github
• Stack overflow
• Google search! ● Activities and Intents :About activities
• Defining Activities
• Activity Lifecycle
• Activity navigation
• About intents
• Explicit vs Implicit intents

Unit 2 User Interface

• ● User Input Controls: Getting user input
• Changing keyboards
• Dialogs and pickers
• checkboxes, and radio buttons
• Speech recognition (not done)
• Sensors (not done) ● Menus: Options menu
• contextual menus (floating and action bar), and popup menu
• Adding menu items
• Handling on Clicks from menus. ● Screen Navigation: Terminology
• Different ways a user can navigate through an app, Action bar, Settings menu
• Navigation drawer
• Directed workflow (funnels)
• Best practices for navigation ● Themes and Styles: Best practices for themes and styles
• Performance benefits for themes
• When and how to use 10 drawables
• best practices for drawable
• When and how to use nine-patches
• best practices for nine-patches
• Tools for creating drawables ● Material Design: What is material design? Material design best practices
• Material Design guidelines
• Implementing Material Design look and feel
• with compatibility with previous versions
• Support library for Material Design design
• Transitions and Animations ● Adapt layouts for multiple devices and orientations: Why we need to consider different screen sizes and orientations
• Screen density (dip or dp)
• How to create adaptive layouts using resources folders
• Different ways to create images that scale nicely
• Images and image formats and how they affect performance (download speeds). ● Accessibility: Why accessibility matters
• Accessibility considerations: Color blindness
• poor vision
• poor hearing
• physical limitations
• Accessibility guidelines
• Testing for accessibility
• Screen readers
• Making your app more accessible: Color and Contrast
• button size --> Material Design guidelines

Unit 3 Background Tasks

10 lecture hours

• ● Connect to the Internet: Background Tasks
• Synchronous versus async tasks
• What is the UI thread and when should you use it?
• Example of a background task -- retrieving data over the internet
• Creating background tasks
• send data
• Implementing AsyncTask (doInBackground()
• Limitations of AsyncTask
• Passing info to background tasks
• Initiating background tasks
• Scheduling background tasks (intro only
• more later). ● Connecting to the Internet: Permissions
• Building URIs
• Opening and closing Internet connections
• Parsing JSON in Android
• (Because it’s common.)
• Sending requests and parsing response. ● AsyncTaskLoade: Intro to AsyncTaskLoader
• AsyncTaskLoader callbacks
• Benefits of loaders ● Broadcast Receivers: What is a Broadcast Receiver and a Broadcast Intent?
• Broadcast Receiver Security and Lifecycle ● Services: What is a service? Long running task without a UI, Difference between Activity and Service
• Start and 10 stop services
• Lifecycle methods
• Foreground services
• IntentService class
• App priority (critical
• How to create a new Service. ● Notifications: What is a Notification?
• Notification Design Guidelines. ● Triggering
• Scheduling, and Optimizing Background Tasks: AlarmManager ● Transferring Data Efficiently: Less data
• less often! Cell radio life cycle
• Job Scheduler
• Why to use Job Scheduler instead of SyncManager/SyncAdapter
• Difference between alarms and job schedulers. 4 ● Data -- Saving
• Loading ● Storing Data in your app: Internal versus external storage