A quick note before we get started.
This video was recorded April 6th, 2015.
Now my suggestion to you is that you don't follow along with the video.
Instead go ahead and watch the video through once.
After you're done with that,
we've provided some text instructions in the instructor notes.
From time to time Android Studio is updated, which means that menus or
screens can look a little bit different.
And while the video might be out of date,
the text instructions will be updated a lot more regularly.
Okay, so if you've closed Android Studio, go ahead and
reopen Android Studio.
You should be staring at the screen.
I'm going to go ahead and
click on this app we named start a new Android Studio project button.
All right that should take you to the screen where we have a couple of
different options.
The first one is the application name.
This is the name that you'll see in the app bar at the top of the app
as well as the all app screen of the device.
Okay, right below this we have company domain and
if this looks similar to your web address, you're right.
Normally, if you own the web address you type it in here.
That one point in my life I owned LylaFujiwara.com.
So if I was making an app for myself instead of a demo app for
all of you I would go ahead and change this to lylafujiwara.com.
Now you might be wondering why.
Well, if I was planning to distribute my app at Google Play.
This package name down here is something that I need to uniquely identify my app.
Meaning that across all of the people in the world who are making apps
this needs to be completely unique.
Now if we look a little bit more of the structure of this
the package name is actually the company domain reversed.
So instead of lylafujiwara.com we have
com.lylafujiwara followed by the application name with no spaces.
So while there might be a couple of different app developers that make
a happy birthday app, you're not going to have a bunch of app developers
that all own lylafujiwara.com and are making a birthday card app.
And then the way that the Internet is set up if I buy lylafujiwara.com
that means I should have complete control over what is shown there and
nobody else can buy that domain name.
And if I own it and it's specific to me then that helps ensure that this package
name is completely unique.
Okay but you're not me and you don't own this domain and since we're all
practicing together and I want us all to have sort of the same set up for
this app, I'm going to change this to android.example.com.
And you should go ahead and use the same company domain because I know that some
of you won't actually own website domains yourself.
Also it will help you batch our code and
if you look below you should see com example Android happy birthday.
And if you look below you should see that it says com.example.android and
again that's the reverse of Android example com and
that is It's says happy birthday after.
Okay so the next thing that you can change is the project location.
This is where all the files that have to deal with your app
will be saved on your computer.
Now usually Android Studio will create a folder for your Android Studio projects
and the default is to just put your app inside this folder.
And you can see that the name actually
matches the name of the folder that it'll be in.
This is a pretty good default location, so unless you have any strong reason to
change it, I'd go ahead and just click next.
Okay, now this is a fun screen.
It let's us pick what phones and
devices that we're going to actually make our application for.
Now you're making an app for a phone and a tablet and you're not trying to make
an app for TV ware or glass, so we're going to leave these all unchecked.
The drop down right here shows us the version of the Android operating system
that our application will support.
We're going to go ahead and scroll up.
You can see that the first public and
widely used release of Android was called cupcake.
With this release Google started a convention where they would
continue to go alphabetically but
they've each operating system off of desserts or sugary treats.
Cupcake was followed by Donut and Eclair.
And this is why you'll see words like Ice Cream Sandwich, Honeycomb and
KitKat in the dropdown menu.
Now below this dropdown you'll see this handy Help Me Choose link.
This graph shows some helpful percentages of how many people who have
Android phones use the different operating system versions.
Looking at it we can see that most users at least at the time of this recording
are using the deliciously named KitKat.
The percentages, so
the percentage of people in the world using Google Play who will be able to
use our app if we pick one of these as our minimum supported version.
So if you pick the newest version of the operating system,
which is lollipop, at least at the time of this recording
only users with new phones would be able to download your app.
And that would be due to only have about 0.1% of all the phone users
actually able to download your app.
So you might be asking why not make it after all phones by
picking the oldest version of the operating system.
Here's a picture of the first commercially available Android phone
the T-Mobile G1 which is also known outside the United States as HTC Dream.
It was released in 2008 and ran Android 1.0.
Obviously a lot has changed since then.
For example, Absolute Google Wallet which let you pay for groceries or
the wave of your smartphone require a near field communication.
A near field communication or NFC Was actually a type of hardware that didn't
make it into Android phones until 2010.
So if you're making an app that requires NFC
there's no reason to even try supporting older phones like this,
that are running older versions of the Android operating system.
Anyway, for the purposes of your app, I want you to use API 15,
which is Ice Cream Sandwich.
This should work for about 90% of the phone users out there.
All right go ahead and click Next.
On this screen you're given a bunch of starting tablet's you can choose from
depending on what you're trying to make.
You going to go ahead choose blank activity which is already selected
because it's the sub-list one and I'm going to click Next.
Finally, this screen gives you the opportunities to name a couple of
different files that are going to be automatically generated for
your application.
As you'll soon see the application is composed of all the picture files,
sound files, XML files, java file and more that are required to make the app.
Basically there are a lot of files that work together to make your application.
Will talk about this all soon.
For now take a look at the layout name.
You've been working on XML layout files so
this is the name of the file we'll be editing in just a little bit.
I'm actually not going to change any of these defaults.
So you can go ahead and click Finish.
Now depending on your computer speed it might take a moment to set
everything up.
If you look down here you'll actually see a little loading circle
as well as a loading bar.
And we can see a loading circle down here as well
meaning that it's continuing to think about things.
So take a break, go ahead, stretch and get some tea or I mean, coffee.