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Creating the Fun Facts Project
6:10In this video we'll walk through setting up a new app project in Android Studio. At last, we get to create something!
Before we start any work I want to
stress one very important thing,
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don't be afraid to make
mistakes with this stuff.
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You can learn so much about programming
from making mistakes and then fixing them.
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You can always undo things and
if you really mess up, you can
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download the project files for each
video or even start over from scratch.
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Check the teacher's notes for a link
about how to import project files, and
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again, we're here to help.
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Head over to the community with
any questions or problems.
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All right,
we're ready to start programming,
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let's get started with our Fun Facts app.
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We're going to approach this as
an iterative process, and we'll
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start with a very simple version that
simply displays one fun fact all the time.
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It won't be very useful or fun yet, but it
will introduce us to the tools we'll use,
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as well as verify that everything is
working correctly on our computers.
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All right, with Android Studio open,
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let's select Start a new Android Studio
project from the top of the list.
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We're going to start with the application
name which is the name of our app.
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Let's type Fun Facts with two capital
letter Fs and a space in between.
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We want this to look exactly how we
want it to appear on the device or
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on the Google Play Store.
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Also the application name can only
consist of letters, numbers, spaces,
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or underscores.
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Next we have the company domain, which
is where you can put your own name or
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the organization you work for.
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I'll leave mine as teamtreehouse.com,
but feel free to use your own.
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Notice that the package name
matches the company name and
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the application name,
it changes based on what we type.
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Although we can go over here and click on
Edit if we want to change it ourselves.
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Just don't add any capital letters to your
package name, that's asking for trouble.
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The package name is important because
it's used to differentiate our app
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from others on the Play Store.
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If there's another Fun Facts app on
the Play Store with the same name,
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then we need something besides just
the application name to tell them apart.
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The package name is
what makes them unique,
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the application name gets
appended to the package name so
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that apps by the same organization can be
grouped together by a common package name.
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So all Team Treehouse apps will
start with com.teamtreehouse.
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We can change the package name later on if
we need to, but it's kind of a hassle, so
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it's best to get it
right here at the start.
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We especially don't want to change it
after we publish our app, the package name
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must be exactly the same in order to
make any updates to an existing app.
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Down here is the project
location on your computer,
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I'll leave mine as is but
feel free to change this, then click Next.
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Now we need to pick devices and version
of Android that our app can run on.
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This can be a little overwhelming at
first, but let's keep it simple and
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leave phone and tablet checked.
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We'll be writing this app to work on
a phone and it will also work on tablets,
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but we aren't going to optimize
how it looks on tablets.
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Now we need to pick the minimum SDK,
which stands for software development kit.
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The Android SDK and
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API levels are often used interchangeably,
there's a one to one relationship.
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Meaning each version of the SDK
has a corresponding API level,
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also we've got a helpful message here.
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Lower API levels target more devices but
have fewer features available.
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Okay, but what does this mean?
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Let's click on the Help me
choose button to find out.
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This brings up a graph showing
the distribution of Android versions
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out in the wild, and
what this shows us is that 97.4%
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of devices are on Android 4.0 or above.
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That corresponds to API level 15, so
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we can feel fairly safe in
picking API level 15 for our app.
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Another nice thing about not using the
lowest API level is that we don't need to
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make any additional changes to
make our app backwards compatible.
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Okay, but what about the very
latest version of Android?
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Well, we are targeting API 15 and
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up, which means that our app should
run on each release as it comes out.
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The API level really only comes into play
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when we're using features that either
lose support or are brand new.
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The Fun Facts app focuses on the basics
though, so this isn't an issue.
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The big difference for us is that Android
will apply some basic visual modifications
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based on which SDK
version the app is using.
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All right,
let's hit OK to leave this screen,
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then make sure API 15 is selected and
hit Next.
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On this screen, we see a list of pre-built
activities that we can chose from.
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In Android,
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activities can be thought of as
the different screens that make up an app.
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Starting from an already built activity
can definitely make building an app
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a little easier.
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But since we're still learning, we'll use
the fourth option, the Empty Activity.
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Let's select that and click Next, and now
we want to pick a name for our activity.
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Typically, we'll want something like
MainActivity for the main activity in
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the app, or a name that describes
what the activity is or does.
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Since we're showing fun facts,
let's name our's FunFactsActivity.
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Notice that as we change the name,
the layout name changes as well, cool.
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Now we can finish and Android Studio will
take a minute to build our project, and
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after a short delay,
we should have everything ready to go.
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You'll notice that Android Studio by
default shows the tip of the day.
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You can choose to not see tips if you
want, but I recommend leaving the tips on
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because you can learn helpful keyboard
shortcuts or other useful information.
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I'll close that to get it out of the way.
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And what we have here is a project
shell that's pretty much ready to run,
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it's a full fledged app,
albeit a very boring one.
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In a moment we'll come back and
run it to make sure everything is working.
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