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Pro Android Wearables: Building Apps for Smartwatches
Pro Android Wearables details how to design and build Android Wear apps for new and unique Android wearable device types, such as Google Android smartwatches, which use the new WatchFaces API, as well as health-monitoring features and other cool features such as altimeters and compasses. It's time to take your Android 5 Wear application development skills and experience to the next level and get exposure to a whole new world of hardware. As smartwatches continue to grab major IoT headlines, there is a growing interest in building Android apps that run on these wearables, which are now being offered by dozens of major manufacturers. This means more revenue earning opportunity for today's indie app developers. Additionally, this book provides new media design concepts which relate to using media assets, as well as how to optimize Wear applications for low-power, single-core, dual-core or quad-core CPUs, and how to use the IntelliJ Android Studio IDE, and the Android device emulators for popular new wearable devices. This book is for Android app developers new to Android apps development for embeddable appliances, wearables, and related hardware. This book takes your Android app development beyond the smartphone and tablet.
567 pages, Kindle Edition
First published June 30, 2015
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November 22, 2015
Awful book. So much padding :-(.
This book is so incredibly verbose and screenshot-heavy in such a worthless way.
Many, many pages tell you how to type in code ("press the period key" is a recurring phrase!), explain that you'll get a pop-up to choose methods, will then show you the line of code you've just entered, and one or two screenshots of the code you've just been told to type or of the IDE helper pop-up showing a list of methods. For example:
That amount of explanation once or twice early on is understandable. But this is almost every page. A couple of lines would have been adequate for something that takes most of a page. I wonder what criteria Apress use to decide to add the "Pro" prefix to their book titles.
Such cynical padding to make it a really fat (and largely unreadable) book, on top of obvious errors in the code, makes me unlikely to consider any of Mr Jackson's books in future. Thank goodness I borrowed it from the library rather than bought it.
This book is so incredibly verbose and screenshot-heavy in such a worthless way.
Many, many pages tell you how to type in code ("press the period key" is a recurring phrase!), explain that you'll get a pop-up to choose methods, will then show you the line of code you've just entered, and one or two screenshots of the code you've just been told to type or of the IDE helper pop-up showing a list of methods. For example:
...declare a Paint.Style object named paintStyle, and set it equal to the default value of Paint.Style.FILL because that is what the watch face vector shape needs to use...
As you type this statement in, an IntelliJ pop-up method helper dialog will appear, and you can select the Paint.Style.FILL option, or double-click it, which will insert it into the Java statement.
The Java method structure, which is shown in figure 10-22, should look like this, once you are done using the IntelliJ pop-up helper dialogs:
private void setBurnInProtect(boolean enabled) {
Paint.Style paintStyle = Paint.Style.FILL;
}
Followed by a screenshot of the IDE showing that code and the pop-up.
That amount of explanation once or twice early on is understandable. But this is almost every page. A couple of lines would have been adequate for something that takes most of a page. I wonder what criteria Apress use to decide to add the "Pro" prefix to their book titles.
Such cynical padding to make it a really fat (and largely unreadable) book, on top of obvious errors in the code, makes me unlikely to consider any of Mr Jackson's books in future. Thank goodness I borrowed it from the library rather than bought it.
Displaying 1 of 1 review