Android Wear Projects

Ashok Kumar S

• Publisher: Packt Publishing
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781787127319
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Computer Science
• Subtopic: Open Source Programming
• Index: Computer Science

A fun way to create interesting and cool apps for your Wearable device using Android programming.About This Book• Create real-time Android Wear apps from scratch and become a pro Android Wear Developer• Learn to create apps specially dedicated to the Android Wear platform• Design custom Wear UIs and create interactive Watch faces Who This Book Is ForThe book is for Android developers with a good understanding of programming and developing applications on Android, but they need not have any experience of creating Wear apps.What You Will Learn• Design and build Wear apps.• Learn how to use offline storage in Wear apps.• Understand sensors and how to work with them• Work with standalone applications of the wear 2.0 API.• Create a map application for Android Wear devices• Write a watch face and understand more about Wear 2.0• Work with firebase realtime database and firebase functions• Create a chatting application that has wear companion appIn DetailAndroid Wear Projects is your opportunity to step into the exciting new world of Android Wear app development. This book will help you to master the skills in Android Wear programming and give you a complete insight on wear app development.You will create five different Android Wear apps just like the most popular Android Wear apps. You will create a To-do list, a city maps app, a Wear messenger, Wear fitness tracker and Watch face. While you create these apps you will learn to create custom notifications, receive voice inputs in notifications, add pages to notifications and stack notifications. You will see how to create custom wear app layouts, the custom UIs specially designed for Wear. You will learn to handle and manage data and syncing data with other devices, create interactive Watch faces and also ensure the safety and security of your Wear apps by testing and securing your apps before you deploy them on the app store.Style and approachThis book will take a project based tutorial style approach where every chapter will create a separate android Wear app and highlight different features of android Wear apps.

Let us Chat in a Smart Way - Messaging API and More

The era of innovation has empowered us to chip away at numerous new shrewd subjects. Social media is currently an intense medium of communication. Taking a gander at the developing pattern of online networking and innovation, we could state that the belief system of social media has advanced and wiped out many difficulties of communication. Just about a couple of decades back, the communication medium was letters. A couple of centuries back, it was trained birds. If we still look back, we will definitely get a few more stories to comprehend the way people used to communicate in those days. Now, we are in the generation of IoT, wearable smart devices, and an era of smartphones, where communication happens across the planet in a fraction of a second. Without elaborating about communication, let's build a mobile and wear application that exhibits the power of Google wear messaging APIs to assist us in building chat application with a Wear companion application to administer and respond to the messages being received. To support the process of chatting, we will be using Google's very own technology Firebase in this chapter. We will not deep dive into the Firebase technologies, but we will surely understand the essentials of using Firebase in mobile platforms and working with wear technologies. A Firebase real-time database reflects the data being updated in its hashmap structure. Essentially, these are the stream of key-value pairs that Firebase works with. The data gets updated with minimal internet bandwidth requirement and instantly.

To support the process of chatting, we will be using Google's very own technology, Firebase, in this chapter. We will comprehend a generic registration and login process for the mobile platform and we will have space for all the registered members and enable every one of them to chat exclusively by picking one user from the list.

In this chapter, we will explore the following points:

• Configuring Firebase to your mobile application
• Creating user interface
• Working with GoogleApiClient
• Understanding the Message API
• Handling events
• Building a wear module

Now, let's understand how to set up Firebase to our project. It follows a few steps that we need to carry out before using Firebase technologies in the project. First, we need to apply the Firebase plugin and then the dependencies that we use in our project.

Installing Firebase

For installing Firebase, perform the following steps:

1. Visit the Firebase console https://console.firebase.google.com:

2. Choose Add project in the console and fill the necessary information about the project. After the project is successfully added, you will see the following screen:

3. The get started page helps you set up the project for different platforms. Let's choose the second option, which says Add Firebase to your Android app:

4. Add the project package name and,...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Credits
• About the Author
• About the Reviewers
• www.PacktPub.com
• Customer Feedback
• Preface
• Getting You Ready to Fly - Setting Up Your Development Environment
• Let us Help Capture What is on Your Mind - WearRecyclerView and More
• Let us Help Capture What is on Your Mind - Saving Data and Customizing the UI
• Measure Your Wellness - Sensors
• Measuring Your Wellness and Syncing Collected Sensor Data
• Ways to Get Around Anywhere - WearMap and the GoogleAPIclient
• Ways to Get Around Anywhere - UI controls and More
• Let us Chat in a Smart Way - Messaging API and More
• Let us Chat in a Smart Way - Notifications and More
• Just a Face for Your Time - WatchFace and Services
• More About Wear 2.0