Android Studio Tips and Tricks to Help You during Development

As an Android developer, writing code should not just be the end goal; rather, understanding how to find issues in your applications, using formatting tips to navigate the code base faster, and other skills come in handy.

The programming process includes a lot of collaboration. This can be in peer code review, pair programming, or debugging issues. In these situations, it is handy if you can move fast, for instance, when debugging or formatting code before you submit your pull request. In this chapter, you will learn great Git and Android Studio tips and tricks to help in your day-to-day development.

In this chapter, we’ll be covering the following recipes:

• The importance of profiling your Android applications
• Quick Android shortcuts to make your development faster
• JetBrains Toolbox and essential plugins to know
• Debugging your code
• How to extract methods and method parameters
• Understanding...

Technical requirements

The complete source code for this chapter can be found at https://github.com/PacktPublishing/Modern-Android-13-Development-Cookbook.

The importance of profiling your Android applications

In Android, profiling is the process of analyzing an application’s performance to identify its strengths and weaknesses. Profiling your Android applications is crucial for the following reasons:

• It helps you identify performance bottlenecks such as slow code, memory leaks, and excessive CPU usage. This knowledge can help you optimize your code and make your application run more efficiently.
• It improves the user experience. A poorly performing application can lead to user frustration and negative reviews. By profiling your application and optimizing its performance, you can provide a better user experience, leading to increased user engagement and positive reviews.
• It helps save time and money. It is much easier and less expensive to fix performance issues early on than to try to fix them later when they have become more complex.

Hence, in this recipe, we will explore why profiling your Android applications...

Quick Android shortcuts to make your development faster

Shortcuts can be helpful to developers by making their work quicker and more efficient, allowing them to focus on writing code and solving problems rather than navigating menus and toolbars. Shortcuts can help automate repetitive tasks such as formatting code, renaming variables, or navigating between files, freeing developers’ time and mental energy for more meaningful work.

In addition, when developers use the same shortcuts across different tools and applications, it can help maintain consistency in their workflows and reduce the risk of errors caused by accidentally using the wrong command or tool. Also, for developers with disabilities or physical limitations, using shortcuts can be a more accessible way to interact with software than using a mouse or trackpad.

Getting ready

This isn’t really a recipe but a list of useful shortcuts, we will look at widely used shortcuts in Windows and Mac, which are...

JetBrains Toolbox and essential plugins to know

JetBrains Toolbox is a software management tool that allows developers to manage and install JetBrains IDEs and related tools on their computers. JetBrains is a software company that provides powerful IDEs (namely IntelliJ) for various programming languages, such as Java, Kotlin, Python, Ruby, and JavaScript. In other words, a plugin is simply any class that implements the plugin interface.

Here are some JetBrains Toolbox features and reasons why you should try using it:

• You can easily download and install any JetBrains IDE from Toolbox. It also ensures that you have the latest version of the IDE installed on your computer.
• Toolbox automatically checks for updates and keeps all the installed JetBrains IDEs and plugins up to date, which means if your current Android Studio is not stable, you can revert to a more stable version.
• You can manage your JetBrains licenses and activate/deactivate them from Toolbox.
• Toolbox...

Debugging your code

As an Android developer, debugging is an essential part of the software development process because it helps identify and fix errors in your code. When debugging, you can quickly identify and fix errors or bugs in your code that can cause your application to crash, behave unexpectedly, or produce incorrect results.

In this recipe, we will explore how you can easily add a breakpoint and debug your code.

Getting ready

To get started with this recipe, you need to have a project open and run the project on your emulator. You do not need to create a new project and can use the GUIAlert project.

How to do it…

We will be trying to debug our code and ensure when we click the items in the menu, we select the correct item. For instance, if we select item 2, when we evaluate the item, we should see the result being 2:

1. First, you need to ensure your app is running; then, click the icon shown in Figure 12.9.

Figure...

How to extract methods and method parameters

Extracting methods and method parameters can add additional imports to your code. This happens because when you extract a method or a parameter, the code that used to be inside the method or parameter is moved to a separate method. If this code relies on other classes or methods that are not already imported into your code, the extraction process may automatically add the necessary import statements to your file.

For example, suppose you have a Kotlin class that contains a method that performs some calculations and returns a result. This method relies on a helper class defined in another package, and you still need to import this class into your code. If you decide to extract the method to a particular method in the same or a different class, the extraction process may add an import statement for the helper class so that the code inside the extracted method can reference the helper class.

Similarly, when you extract a method parameter...

Understanding Git essentials

This recipe is meant to help any new developers that might have stumbled upon this book. Git is a popular version control system that allows developers to manage and track changes to their code base.

Here are some essential concepts to understand:

• A repository is a collection of files and folders that Git is tracking. It’s also known as a repo. This is the most common term.
• A commit is a snapshot of the changes made to a repository. Each commit has a unique identifier containing information about the changes made, such as the author, the date, and a message describing the changes.
• A branch is a separate line of development that allows developers to work on different features or versions of a project simultaneously. It’s like a parallel universe of the repository.
• When developing, merging your work refers to combining changes from one branch into another. It’s typically used when a feature is complete and ready...