Chapter 1: Android Activities
In This Chapter
Launching an activity
Going through an activity’s lifecycle
Getting information from an activity
On a desktop computer, everything starts with a window. Open a window, and run a word processor. Open another window, and read your e-mail. Move a window, minimize a window, resize a window. It’s a very familiar story.
But mobile devices aren’t desktop computers. A smartphone has a relatively small screen, and if by chance you could open several windows at once, the phone’s processor would fall over from exhaustion. On a mobile phone, the “window” metaphor would lead to nothing but trouble.
Tablet devices have larger screens and better processors than their telephone cousins. You can probably squeeze a few windows on a tablet screen, but the power that you would allocate to window-handling could be put to better use.
So where does that leave you? The earliest computers had no windows and no multi-tasking. You can’t have that. Without some kind of multi-tasking, “smartphones” wouldn’t be smart.
Along comes Android’s solution — namely, the activity. In other chapters, I refer to an activity as “one ‘screenful’ of components.” I liken activities ...
