Android Mobile App - A Published RSS Reader App

Beautiful apps are downloaded up to 10x more than plain looking apps. I give you an example of beautiful apps vs ugly apps on the Play store.

We steal a few ideas for making a beautiful app from other areas of creative endeavours. Apps following this philosophy will be subtly good looking, without overdoing it. Most importantly they will stick to Google design guidelines. These guidelines are a must for developers looking to support a wide range of devices and form factors out there.

Did you know that Apple have a document called the human interface guidelines? It's an excellent document that can teach us a lot about how users interact with a touch screen. It is applicable to all apps, not just on iOS! We also sneak a peek at Androids own Material Design guidelines.

A user experience (UX) design should be as simple as possible. It must cover the basic functions such as navigating between scenes. It should also consider the emotions initiated in your user when they view a particularly good transition take place, such emotions connect your user to your app, making it less likely they will uninstall it.

We run through installation of the Android simulator and how to open up our app within it. Ensure that HAXM from Intel is installed in the options I show - this improves emulator run speed by a large amount. Alternatively you can run the app on a USB connected Android device

We choose a color theme for our app and I show you some of my favourite tools for doing this.

We design the add feed screen using Android layouts. It is a very simple screen with a box (named EditText in the Android world) and one button. Despite being simple we will apply the principles we've learnt to make it look good.

We go through the layout creation of a list of scrolling items (Android ListView).

Often a confusing subject, I walk you through the basic Android manifest and styles.xml documents. These allow you to set the theme over the entire app in a consistent manner.

We look at how to add new activities and how to start them up. As a bonus we learn the Android navigational pattern introduced in Lollipop and backward compatible to Android 4.

In all of your apps you will need to store data. SQLite databases are the most common and fundamental way to do that. I also explain exactly what a database is.

We construct the core Java code used to access our SQLite database. We will be able to add, find and delete feeds using this code.

We learn how to take data input on an Android screen and store it within an SQLite database for later use.

We take a deep dive into the world of list views (known as ListView on Android), a concept you will use over and over again in your coding career. I explain them very clearly using Lego illustrations.

Discover how to remove rows from a List View and delete that row from the underlying SQLite database at the same time.

Every Android app needs to ask permission for certain activities. We look at how to edit the manifest.xml document to request these.

Before we install our RSS library we first create the feed item class to hold our feed items. Classes and objects are fundamental to Java, see my other course on Object Orientation if you'd like to understand them fully.

We install the Simple RSS 2 library available on GitHub. This allows our Java code to seamlessly request RSS items from an external feed.

We use an asynchronous call to fetch our feeds - and we encounter our first bug! We learn what happens when an Android app crashes (clue: it's not good for user experience!)

We learn about error handling and try catch statements. We look at when to them in Java.