Android Apps with Kotlin: Resources, Styles, and Themes
Learn the skills necessary to create engaging applications that leverage the Android resource system to provide rich styling and an effective user experience that automatically adapts to the wide-ranging needs of Android's diverse user base.
What you'll learn
Successful apps have a high bar to meet. They must be adaptable to a broad set of devices, be usable by a culturally diverse user base, and provide a rich and engaging visual appearance. In this course, Android Apps with Kotlin: Resources, Styles, and Themes, you'll learn everything you need to know to create apps that achieve this high standard. First, you’ll see how to use the Android resource system to provide app content that adapts to differing device characteristics. After that, you’ll incorporate images and other drawable resources into your app in a way that allows the system to automatically select the appropriate choice to best accommodate each device’s display density. Next, you’ll explore how to use value resources to specify strings and other values in a way that allows for easy language localization and configuration-based adjustment of display characteristics. Finally, you’ll delve into leverage styles and themes to customize the color, styling, and overall appearance of your app. By the end of this course, you’ll have the skills and knowledge to create rich and engaging Android apps that are able to effectively adapt to a wide range of devices and users.
Table of contents
- Introduction 2m
- Resource Purpose and Interaction 5m
- Our Demo App 2m
- Using and Accessing Resources 3m
- When Sythesized Properties Aren't Enough 3m
- Resource Adaptability 4m
- Adapting to Configuration Changes 6m
- Creating a Layout Resource Landscape Variation 3m
- Customizing the Layout Variation 4m
- Understanding How Adaptability Works 4m
- Summary 2m
- Introduction 1m
- Drawable Resources Come in Many Forms 3m
- Creating a Shape Resource 4m
- Enhancing the Shape Resource Appearance 4m
- Working with Vector Resources 5m
- Vector Resources and Scaling 3m
- Comparing Shape, Vector, and Rastor Resources 4m
- Dealing with Display Densities 3m
- Display Density-specific Resources 5m
- Creating Qualified Resource Directories 8m
- Resource Installation 3m
- Summary 3m
- Introduction 1m
- A Quick Look at String Resources 2m
- String Resources in the Project 5m
- Converting Literal Strings to Resources in Layouts 6m
- String Resources in Code 1m
- Accessing String Resources from Code 4m
- String Resources with Value Substitution 6m
- Localizing UI Text into Alternate Languages 4m
- Verifying Localized Text Behavior 4m
- Summary 2m
- Introduction 1m
- Android View Attributes 2m
- View Styles 4m
- Applying Styles to textAppearance 4m
- Declaring a New Style 3m
- Style Inheritance 2m
- Inheriting a Framework Style 4m
- Inheriting a Project Style 6m
- Creating a Floating Action Button Style 5m
- Finding the Floating Action Button Parent Style 4m
- Summary 2m
About the author
Jim Wilson is president of JW Hedgehog, Inc., a consulting firm specializing in solutions for the Android, iOS, and Microsoft platforms. Jim has over 30 years of software engineering experience, with the past 15 years heavily focused on creating mobile device and location-based solutions. He has co-founded multiple software-related startups and has served in a consulting role at several more. After nearly a decade as a Microsoft Device Application Development MVP, Jim now focuses on developing A... more