Professional Android™ 2 Application Development

Chapter 15. Advanced Android Development

WHAT'S IN THIS CHAPTER?

• Android security using Permissions

• Using Wake Locks

• The Text to Speech libraries

• Interprocess communication (IPC) using AIDL and Parcelables

• Creating frame-by-frame and tweened animations

• Advanced Canvas drawing

• Using the Surface View

• Listening for key presses, screen touches, and trackball movement

In this chapter, you'll be returning to some of the possibilities touched on in previous chapters and exploring some of the topics that deserve more attention.

In the first seven chapters, you learned the fundamentals of creating mobile applications for Android devices. In Chapters 8 through 14 you were introduced to some of the more powerful and some optional APIs, including location-based services, maps, Bluetooth, and hardware monitoring and control.

This chapter starts by taking a closer look at security, in particular, how Permissions work and how to use them to secure your own applications.

Next you'll examine Wake Locks and the text to speech libraries before looking at the Android Interface Definition Language (AIDL). You'll use AIDL to create rich application interfaces that support full object-based interprocess communication (IPC) between Android applications running in different processes.

You'll then take a closer look at the rich toolkit available for creating user interfaces for your Activities. Starting with animations, you'll learn how to apply tweened animations to Views and View Groups, and construct frame-by-frame ...