Bootcamp Highlights - Android part 2

Guest post by Kimberley HaywardThis bootcamp was focused on Android UI and style, and how to make both code, and the app itself, more visually appealing. To start off we looked into refactoring, where you restructure your code to make it easier to read and more logical. Luckily our code hasn’t been used too much or changed to a large extent and so for us refactoring wasn’t necessary. Next, we focused on the UI of the app itself, which after last session was displaying text but didn’t have any real style to it. We started off with themes, which let you change the style of different app views by altering the likes of colours and fonts. Then we moved onto intents which are used to link different activities together, where activities can, for example, be transitions between different views. After this came constraint layouts which you use to align different components in relation to their parents or each other.Changing tone, to focus on how UI works with the code, we finished up the bootcamp by covering:

• Drawables, which might be images or other resources you wish to display.
• Databinding, whereby you bind UI components with data sources.
• String/Text, of which you can store snippets and then make references to. For example, store the word ‘Ok’ as a resource, and then call on the resource every time you need that phrase, say for buttons.

 The next bootcamp, Architecture and Infrastructure Components, is coming up on the 22nd of May so don’t forget to register! Even if you haven’t come along to the last couple, you can find all the code online on GitHub so feel free to look over it and come along to the next one!