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Build an Interactive Story App

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Adding a Second Activity

1:57 with Ben Jakuben

Everything we've done thus far has been in the context of a single activity. This is fine for lots of apps, but sooner or later we're going to want to add more than one screen. Let's see how!

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    Everything we've done thus far in our course has been in the context 0:00
    of a single activity. 0:03
    This is fine for a lot of apps, but sooner or later, 0:04
    we're going to want to add more than one screen. 0:06
    Well, really soon, now, to be exact. 0:09
    Currently our app has one activity and one layout file associated with it. 0:12
    Let's add another one, and we'll see how to get to it from our main activity. 0:16
    We want to make sure that we add the new activity in the same package 0:20
    as our main activity. 0:23
    So right=click on the package here, then select New and then down here we 0:24
    can select Activity, and from the right we want this to be a new Empty Activity. 0:29
    For the name, 0:35
    let's call this StoryActivity because this will display the actual story. 0:36
    If we leave this checked, we'll get a new Layout File. 0:42
    We do not want this to be the Launcher Activity. 0:44
    Our main activity is the Launcher Activity, 0:46
    meaning that it's what's launched when the app first loads. 0:48
    We do want Backwards Compatibility checked so we can use the AppCompat activity, 0:51
    and we've already selected the correct package here, so we can click Finish. 0:55
    All right, easy enough. 1:01
    We'll set the layout in a little while. 1:02
    But first things first, let's figure out how to navigate here from our main 1:03
    activity when we tap on that button. 1:07
    So let's go back to our MainActivity file. 1:10
    And right now we are just toasting the name. 1:13
    We can go ahead and delete this line. 1:14
    But we do want to keep the code that sets the name variable as we're going 1:18
    to want that. 1:21
    Now we could just start our new activity right here, but 1:22
    instead let's put it inside of a new method. 1:24
    This will make things a little bit easier to understand. 1:26
    Let's just type a method and we'll create it with a quick fix, startStory() and 1:29
    now if we click on it and hit Alt+Enter, we can create the new method. 1:35
    And we want to create it inside MainActivity, 1:40
    not inside our anonymous inner class. 1:42
    That creates it down here as a private void method. 1:44
    And inside here, we want to start our new activity using an important Android object 1:47
    known as an intent. 1:52
    Let's talk about intents for a minute before we write the code we need. 1:54

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