Head First Android Development

Chapter 6. List Views and Adapters: Getting Organized

Want to know how best to structure your Android app?

You’ve learned about some of the basic building blocks that are used to build apps, and now it’s time to get organized. In this chapter, we’ll show you how you can take a bunch of ideas and structure them into an awesome app. We’ll show you how lists of data can form the core part of your app design, and how linking them together can create a powerful and easy-to-use app. Along the way, you’ll get your first glimpse of using event listeners and adapters to make your app more dynamic.

Every app starts with ideas

When you first come up with an idea for an app, you’ll have lots of thoughts about what the app should contain.

As an example, the guys at Starbuzz want a new app to entice more customers to their stores. These are some of the ideas they came up with for what the app should include:

These are all ideas that users of the app will find useful. But how do you take all of these ideas and organize them into an intuitive, well-organized app?

Categorize your ideas: top-level, category, and detail/edit activities

A useful way to bring order to these ideas is to categorize them into three different types of activity: top-level activities, category activities, and detail/edit activities. ...