2.5. Building the App’s GUI with the Graphical Layout Editor

You’ll now create the Welcome app’s GUI. The IDE’s Graphical Layout editor allows you to build your GUI by dragging and dropping GUI components—such as TextViews, ImageViews and Buttons—onto an app. By default, the GUI layout for a Blank App is stored in an XML file called activity_main.xml, located in the project’s res folder in the layout subfolder. In this chapter, we’ll use the Graphical Layout editor and the Outline window to build the app and will not study the generated XML. The Android development tools have improved to the point that, in most cases, you do not need to manipulate the XML markup directly.