Long gone are the days of mobile apps with a static UI squished on a tiny screen. Today's users expect mobile apps to be dynamic and highly interactive. They expect an app to look fantastic when they look at it on their medium resolution smartphone and just as fantastic when they switch over to using it on their high-resolution tablet. Apps need to provide rich navigation features, be adaptive, and be responsive.
Trying to meet these demands using Android's traditional activity-centric UI design model is dif cult at best. As developers, we need more control than that afforded by activities. We need a new approach, and fragments give us this new approach.
In this book, you'll learn how to use fragments to meet the challenges of creating dynamic UIs in the modern world of mobile app development.
jQuery tends to be an easy library for many developers and designers to learn, but the danger comes when they start to feel friction with the actual JavaScript language, not the jQuery library. Jack appreciates this friction and tries to alleviate that roadblock for his readers.
Jack gives a good overview of the main topics that jQuery covers and provides numerous code examples and snippets for his readers to grasp. I personally nd that the technical books I most enjoy reading are ones that have code sprinkled here and there so that I can fully grasp the concepts explained in the prose.
jQuery is a fast-evolving library and new versions come out frequently. As a result, new features are added and others are deprecated from version to version. If you are new to jQuery or need a quick refresher, this book will navigate you toward the appropriate API methods and techniques you’ll need to become pro cient with the jQuery library.
What this book covers
Chapter 1, Getting Started, introduces you to the AngularJS framework. We create a super simple app in AngularJS that highlights some core features of the framework.
Chapter 2, Building Our First App – 7 Minute Workout, will teach us how to build our rst real AngularJS app. In the process, we learn more about the framework's MVC constructs and are introduced to scopes and binding capabilities of the framework. We learn about code organization using modules and dependency injection, look at view routing in action, and learn how to use lters.
Chapter 3, More AngularJS Goodness for 7 Minute Workout, focuses on adding the bells and whistles to the 7 Minute Workout app and in the process touches upon into some new Angular capabilities. This chapter covers Angular services, digest cycles, animation support, lters and few other concepts.
Chapter 4, Building Personal Trainer, introduces a new exercise where we morph
7 Minute Workout into a generic Personal Trainer app. The new app has the capability to create new workout plans other than the original 7 Minute Workout app. In this chapter, we exclusively focus on AngularJS form capabilities.
Chapter 5, Adding Data Persistence to Personal Trainer, covers retrieving and saving data to the server. We augment our Personal Trainer with data load and data persistence capabilities. Server interaction and data persistence have been ignored in all the previous chapters.
Chapter 6, Working with Directives, explains directives by building some of our own custom directives for the Personal Trainer app. Directives are the most powerful and most misunderstood feature of AngularJS.
Chapter 7, Testing the AngularJS App, highlights how to use the AngularJS testing constructs within Personal Trainer as AngularJS was built with testability in mind.
Chapter 8, Handling Common Scenarios, provides some practical tips and guidance around scenarios that we might encounter while developing apps on this framework. We will cover scenarios such as structuring the app for complex views, inter controller/directive communication, common framework pitfalls, authentication and authorization, code organization for large size apps, and other similar scenarios.
As the number of Internet users on mobile devices is growing every moment, your websites are no longer built only for the desktop machines. The mobile- rst philosophy demands the sites to be fully compatible for all available and future mobile devices. Bootstrap allows and easily enables you to design and develop your websites congenial to all devices including various screen readers.
We have until now developed your websites using all those manual CSS classes and quite a number of various JavaScript libraries. Delivering the desired results and upgrading your websites has traditionally been quite a challenge. Mobile devices coming into the picture has made the task even more dif cult. Bootstrap comes
to your rescue here – providing all you need including CSS classes and JavaScript components in a single package.
This book covers all the theoretical and practical aspects of Bootstrap and makes you a pro cient web developer for the mobile world. You will be able to download, include, and con gure Bootstrap in your web project. You will understand the internal architecture and structure of Bootstrap and get fully familiar with the usage of Bootstrap CSS and components and become apprised of the JavaScript objects offered by Bootstrap. You will also be able to build and compile Bootstrap from the source code, and nally customize and extend to suit your requirements.
jQuery 2.0 Development Cookbook will provide you with many reusable code recipes to create common and unique website and web application elements, plugins, and interfaces using the most popular client-side framework, jQuery. Following the step-by-step instructions for each of the recipes will not only provide you with useable code, but also the understanding needed to extend and improve on it.
CSS3 is the latest version of Cascading Style Sheets, the language that in the hands of a skilled designer turns the ugly duckling of unadorned HTML into the gracious swan of a sophisticated web page. Some web designers will tell you dismissively that CSS3 won’t be ready for years. In one sense, they’re right. Instead of one massive speci cation, CSS3 has been broken up into more than 40 modules, some of which are unlikely to gain formal approval for a long time. But the rst modules are already complete, while others have reached a high level
of stability and are widely implemented by browsers. What’s more, CSS3 embraces the whole of the previous version, CSS2.1, a formal standard that’s supported by all browsers in widespread use.
is book covers not only the new parts of CSS3, but also those inherited from CSS2.1. Even ancient browsers, such as Internet Explorer (IE) 6 and 7, support most of CSS2.1. So, you’ll nd large parts of this book relevant even if you still need to support older browsers.
Because CSS is constantly evolving, this book inevitably represents a snapshot in time (August 2012). But I’ve tried to structure the content in such a way that it will remain relevant even when new modules begin to mature. New modules will add extra features rather than supersede what’s covered in this book.
In addition to all the visual properties of CSS2.1, it covers stable features from the following CSS3 modules:
CSS3 Selectors
CSS3 Color
CSS3 Values and Units
Media Queries (for responsive web design)
CSS3 Backgrounds and Borders
CSS3 Text
CSS3 Fonts
CSS3 Image Values and Replaced Content (gradients)
CSS Multi-column Layout
CSS Transforms
CSS Transitions
CSS Animations
CSS Flexible Box Layout
I just love new programming languages. Perhaps it's the inevitable familiarity
and ennui with regard to existing languages and the frustration with existing tools, syntaxes, coding conventions, and performance. Maybe I'm just hunting for that one "language to rule them all". Whatever the reason, any time a new or experimental language is released, I have to dive right in.
This has been a golden age for new languages and language design. Think about it: the C language was released in the early 1970s—a time when resources were so scarce that verbosity, clarity, and syntactical logic were often eschewed for thrift. And most of the languages we use today were either originally written in this era or were directly in uenced by those languages.
Since the late 1980s and early 1990s, there has been a slow ood of powerful new languages and paradigms—Perl, Python, Ruby, PHP, and JavaScript—have taken
an expanding user base by storm and has become one of the most popular languages (up there with stalwarts such as C, C++, and Java). Multithreading, memory caching, and APIs have allowed multiple processes, dissonant languages, applications, and even separate operating systems to work in congress.
And while this is great, there's a niche that until very recently was largely unserved: powerful, compiled, cross-platform languages with concurrency support that are geared towards systems programmers.
Programming is the most fun a person can have on their own. This is a fact well-known to programmers, though it seems the rest of the world is yet to catch on. You already know this or you wouldn't be reading this book, but it constantly amazes me that more people aren't falling over themselves to learn to code.
Meanwhile, mobile devices have made computers fun even for non-coders. We carry in our pockets small machines with incredible processing power and a giddying array of sensors and interfaces.
Android takes these fun machines and makes them accessible to programmers through a fabulously well-crafted platform and tool chain, in a programming language that has stood the test of time yet continues to develop and evolve.
What could possibly be better than programming fun machines to do cool things, in a powerful language, on a well-crafted platform, with a world-class tool chain? For me, the answer is doing so with a good enough understanding of those things to make the difference between a good app and a great one.
There are many things that must come together to make a great app. You need a great idea—I can't help you there. You need a pretty user interface—sorry, wrong book. You need a great user experience—aha! Now we're getting somewhere. Among the many things that contribute to a great user experience, responsiveness is right up there near the top of the list.
It's easiest to de ne responsiveness with examples of its lack: pauses and glitches while scrolling content, user interfaces that freeze while loading data from storage, applications that don't give progress updates to let us know what's happening, failing to complete work that we initiated, staring at a spinner while data is fetched from the network, and the list goes on.
This book is about making the difference between a good app and a great one; smoothing out the glitches, keeping the UI responsive, telling the user how things are going, making sure we nish what we started, using those powerful multicore processors, and doing it all without wasting the battery. Let's have some fun!
What this book covers
Chapter 1, Building Responsive Android Applications, gives an overview of the Android process and thread model, and describes some of the challenges and bene ts of concurrency in general, before discussing issues speci c to Android.
Chapter 2, Staying Responsive with AsyncTask, covers the poster child of concurrent programming in Android. We learn how AsyncTask works, how to use it correctly, and how to avoid the common pitfalls that catch out even experienced developers.
Chapter 3, Distributing Work with Handler and HandlerThread, details the fundamental and related topics of Handler, HandlerThread, and Looper, and illustrates how they can be used to schedule tasks on the main thread, and to coordinate and communicate work between cooperating background threads.
Chapter 4, Asynchronous I/O with Loader, introduces the Loader framework and tackles the important task of loading data asynchronously to keep the user interface responsive and glitch free.
Chapter 5, Queuing Work with IntentService, gives us the means to perform background operations beyond the scope of a single Activity lifecycle and to ensure that our work is completed even if the user leaves the application.
Chapter 6, Long-running Tasks with Service, extends the capabilities we discovered with IntentService and gives us control over the level of concurrency applied to our long-running background tasks.
Chapter 7, Scheduling Work with AlarmManager, completes our toolkit by enabling us to arrange for work to be done far into the future and on repeating schedules. It also enables us to build apps that alert users to new content and start instantly with fresh data.
Welcome to the dynamic world of Android smartphone and tablet app development with the Android Software Development Kit (SDK), the JavaTM programming language and the rapidly evolving Android Studio Integrated Development Environment (IDE). Many of the Android techniques we present also apply to Android Wear and Android TV app development, so after reading this book, you’ll be well prepared to investigate developing apps for these platforms.
Android 6 for Programmers: An App-Driven Approach presents leading-edge mobile computing technologies for professional software developers. In our app-driven approach, we present concepts in complete working Android apps, rather than using code snippets. Chapters 2–9 each present one app. Each chapter begins with an introduction to the app, an app test-drive showing one or more sample executions and an overview of the technol- ogies we used to build the app. Then we present a detailed source-code walkthrough. All of the source code is available at
http://www.deitel.com/books/AndroidFP3
We recommend that you view each app’s source code in the IDE as you read the chapter. The opportunities for Android app developers are enormous. Sales of Android devices and app downloads have been growing exponentially. The first-generation Android phones were released in October 2008. According to IDC, after the first three months of 2015, Android had 78% of the global smartphone market share, compared to 18.3% for Apple, 2.7% for Microsoft and 0.3% for Blackberry.1 Over one billion Android devices shipped in 2014 alone.2 At the 2015 Google I/O conference, Google announced that in the prior 12 months there had been 50 billion app installs from Google PlayTM—Google’s marketplace for Android apps.3 Fierce competition among popular mobile platforms and carriers is leading to rapid innovation and falling prices. In addition, competition among the hundreds of Android device manufacturers is driving hardware and software innova-
tion within the Android community.
Welcome to Learning Material Design, a comprehensive guide to the latest and hottest design philosophy for mobile and web applications. More than just a design language, Material Design represents a powerful shift in how modern digital interfaces look and behave. Based largely on traditional design principles, Material Design brings a tactile look and feel to apps and pages, giving screen elements physical properties such as uid, realistic motion and the ability to depict a third dimension using shadows.
Covering all major design principles and guidelines and including enough of the technologies and code required to implement them, the book is designed so that you can get started with building your own material interfaces from the very beginning.
All the commonly used material components, such as cards and sliding drawers, are covered in terms of both design guidelines and code structures. This element-speci c approach is coupled with details on how Material Design can be applied to interfaces in general, and how to use these guidelines to create material transitions and navigation processes.
Although concentrating largely on mobile interface design and using the powerful Android Studio development environment, the latter part of the book focuses on how the principles learned earlier can be just as easily applied to designs of web
and desktop interfaces with a number of helpful and simple-to-use CSS frameworks, particularly Materialize and Material Design Lite.
This book is only the beginning of a journey into what may well become one of the most persistent digital design paradigms we have yet seen. But by the end, you will have learned not only the design theory behind materials, but also enough
of technical know-how to put what you have learned into practice and be in a position to create or convert Material Design applications on your own.
What this book covers
Chapter 1, Getting Started with Material Design, introduces some of the basic precepts of Material Design, but concentrates largely on how to set up a development environment and create a simple "Hello World" app. This includes an introduction to the material theme and palette.
Chapter 2, Building a Mobile Layout, is where we concentrate on some fundamental processes in designing an Android interface, such as the content hierarchy and how components are positioned and scaled within it. The second portion of this chapter covers support libraries and how these can help us make Material Design backward compatible.
Chapter 3, Common Components, covers the most frequently used mobile material components, such as app bars, menus, and modal dialogs, along with the creation of action icons for menus.
Chapter 4, Sliding Drawers and Navigation, explains the typical material navigation techniques, in particular, the navigation menu and sliding drawers.
Chapter 5, Lists, Cards, and Data, is where we see how the recycler view can be used to organize data in the form of a list, and how separate elds of mixed media can be applied to the card view widget.
Chapter 6, Animations and Transitions, covers transition from one screen to another, including hide and reveal animations and how components that are shared across screens are animated.
Chapter 7, Material on Other Devices, is where we look at how Material Design is applied to the Android TV and Wear platforms.
Chapter 8, Material Web Frameworks, takes us on a brief tour of one of the most commonly used technologies for applying Material Design to web pages. This is done using ready-made CSS and JavaScript frameworks.
Chapter 9, The Materialize Framework, delves deeper into the Materialize web frameworks, demonstrating how common components, animations, and navigation are achieved.
Chapter 10, Material Design Lite, is the nal chapter. It covers the most popular material framework—Material Design Lite. As in the previous chapter, we explore the most commonly used components and features.
