If you were wondering if it's worth it to enroll for the Android Basics Nanodegree by Google, this repository might help you decide. My answer is: absolutely yes! From zero to hero! In those 6 months you get familiar with the basics of android development and in the end you will find yourself building your own apps. I created this repository so you can find out if this Nanodegree Program is something for you. Feel free to contact me on LinkedIn I'll try answer all of your remaining questions there.
Topics covered in the Nanodegree program:
- User Interface - You will learn how to build nice screens, layouts according to standards, so your apps will look good
- User Input - You will learn how to make your apps interactive.
- MultiScreen Apps - The more screen you have, the more possibilities you discover. You will learn about switching among different screens, activities and fragments.
- Networking - There are a huge amount of available API-s all over the internet, with the help of them you can build apps with dynamic content. You will learn about HTTP requests, JSON Parsing and threads.
- Data Storage - Now you have the data, you need to store them somewhere, right? You'll learn about storing data with the help of SQLite.
You will learn all of the above through 10 relevant projects step by step. These are te 10 projects I completed during the 6 month Android Basics Nanodegree by Google Scholarship:
Project Description: Design and implement a simple app that displays information about a small business.
Android Tags: #userinterface
Personal Comment: I built a single screen app for my mother's hand-decorated gingerbread business. NOthing fancy, but hey, this was my first time!
Project Description: Implement an app to track scores between two teams within a game.
Android Tags: #userinput #animation
Personal Comment: This was the app I had the most fun with. I just could not stop improving it through iterations. It started as a boxing score tracker, but at one point I felt that I really needed to shake it up a bit, so I generally reskinned the app. I was so excited that I even made a promo video for it, check it out below, especially if you are a Dragon Ball fan.
Project Description: Design and implement a short quiz app about some topic you are familiar with.
Android Tags: #listview
Personal Comment: *Nothing special, a quiz app with a ListView and some simple logic under the hood. This was my first time I imported a library. I used Fancybuttons by medyo to make the submission button, well you guessed it: fancy. :)
Project Description: Architect the user experience and technical design of an app to play music for a user.
Android Tags: #multiscreen #intents #arraylist #listview #customclasses
Personal Comment: My second most beloved project. Although we only had to build the structure of the app, I will definitely contiue developing this one to full functionality. I know looks a bit like spotify, right? Except, blue is much cooler than green ;)
Project Description: Create a custom Java class to model the information in a student report card.
Android Tags: #customclass
Personal Comment: Building a UI was not the part of this assigment, so no screens are added here. The point was to create a custom java class which comes very handy when building apps.
Project Description: Create an app to guide a user around a city or location of your choice!
Android Tags: #multiscreen #listview #navigationdrawer
Personal Comment: 4 different lists, a navigation drawer and my favorite places in my hometown: Debrecen. You're welcome to visit my lovely city any time, again just drop me a line on LinkedIn and I'll show you around :)
Create an app to list the published books on a given topic using the Google Books API.
Android Tags: #jsonparsing #HTTPnetworking #threads #parallelism #recyclerview
Personal Comment I, myself am not much of a reader, but this was the first time I fetched data from the net. It was a blast to see, when I got it workink.
Project Description: Create an app to display recent news stories on a topic of your choice using a web API.
Android Tags: #jsonparsing #HTTPnetworking #threads #parallelism #recyclerview
Personal Comment *This project was pretty similar to the book listing app, but making the preferences work was a real challenge.
Project Description: Create an app to track your habits.
Android Tags: #sqlite #contractclass #cursor
Personal Comment *Again, this was a limited functionality app like the Report Card app, to learn the essentials of data storage and how sqlite tables work.
Project Description: Create an app to track the inventory of a retail store, including current stock and supplier information.
Android Tags: #sqlite #contractclass #cursor #contentprovider#cursorloader
Personal Comment *If someone would have told me when I started, that I'm going to build an app of this complexity in 6 months, I could not have believed him. Two completely different screens interacting with each other, storing the data given in in the SQLite database. The only app I needed to submit 3 times to meet the requirements. So it was hard to build it, but I could not help but enjoy the whole process.
** NOTE ** If you find this repository useful, please give a ★ at the top to make me happy :)
My special thanks and heart go to Viki.Sch, Judit Juhasz, adammia,mbianka89, gxlinda, mrpeny and many more, who were there to help me when it got difficult for me due to personal reasons. Thank you guys!