This Weeks Links

ConstraintLayout Chains – Part 1
ConstraintLayout alpha 9 is now available and there has been an important addition, Chains. In the simplest terms chains are a mechanism for linking together a number of distinct Views. This post will demonstrate how this new feature works for you.

Your App icon as AnimatedVectorDrawable
In Lollipop, the Android team released AnimatedVectorDrawable and starting from Nougat, it will run on RenderThread, providing smoother animations. This post will show you how to turn a logo icon into VectorDrawable, which can then be used as a loading animation.

Extending Mockito
Writing our own Mockito matcher can be a great way to simplify your unit tests. This blogpost will demonstrate the power of custom Mockito matchers.

How Kotlin became our primary language for Android
Developing a commercial application in a new programming language introduces some difficulties. In this post, Dima Kovalenko, shares an experience the UPTech Team had when developing a commercial application entirely in Kotlin.

‘Fully Reactive Apps’ at Droidcon UK 2016
Paco Estevez shares a video of his Droidcon UK 2016 presentation on Fully Reactive Apps along with a sample app. The 3 main points of discussion in the presentation were: integrating the Android lifecycle into your business logic, preparing your Observable chains for maintenance and handling of errors in an existing production app.

Easiest way to give SET_ANIMATION_SCALE permission for your ui tests
Tired of dealing with UiAutomator, Build System or ADB to disable animations when testing in Espresso? In this post, Artem Zinnatullin, will show you an easier way to disable animations.

RxSnackbar using RxJava 2 with undo example.
With the recent release of RxJava 2.0, Scott Cooper, decided it was time to see what was new! In this post, he will demonstrate a Snackbar that allows him to subscribe to updates when an action is performed and when the Snackbar is dismissed, using RxJava 2.

Support ended for Eclipse Android Developer Tools
Eclipse Android Developer Tools support and development has officially ended with the release of Android Studio 2.2. This post will provide reasons why you should make the switch and will help get you started migrating over to Android Studio 2.2.

Audio (not) playing in Android
Halyna Halkina shares her experience, problems and solutions she came across while trying to have multiple audio files playing in her app at the same time.

Jobs Looking to hire an Android Dev? Look no further, post your job in the Android Dev Digest for one to four weeks. Reach over 15,000 Android professionals. Learn More

Create an Audio Recorder on Android
In this tutorial, S.Saurel will show you how you can create an Audio Recorder on Android by using the MediaRecorder API provided in Android SDK.

Create a Blink Effect on Android
One way of making your applications different from others is by adding some effects.In this tutorial, S.Saurel will teach you how to create a blink effect on Android, to help your app stand out.

No Cause for Concern — RxJava and Retrofit Throwing a Tantrum
This post shares an interesting API design issue in the Throwable class of the JDK that led to bugs in RxJava and Retrofit, which Square recently encountered. This is a write-up of how we found those bugs.

Android Code Style and Guidelines
These standard coding style guidelines can help you develop better applications, in less time and they will help others to understand your code. Take a look at this list of sources from Amit Shekhar will help you standardize your code!

Google Open Source Report Card
Check out Google’s first Open Source Report Card, highlighting their most popular projects, sharing a few statistics and detailing some of the projects they have released this year.

Material Design Awards 2016
Take a look at the winners of the second annual Material Design Awards. This post list the best-in-class achievements in employing Material Design of 2016.

Videos

Caster.IO Lesson 118: Mockito – Writing Testable Code
This lesson describes how code should be structured to allow the full power of Mockito to be harnessed.

In this lesson you will learn:

• How to make code more testable
• Mockito can’t help us test if the code isn’t structured well in the first place
• Taking control of dependencies using dependency injection
• The problems caused when a class creates its own dependencies

Caster.IO Lesson 119: MockWebServer – Using a Custom TestRule
Since you will be starting and shutting down the MockWebServer in each test method, you can extract that into a JUnit TestRule to save repetition. This lesson will show you how to do that.

In this lesson you will learn:

• How to put a MockWebServer into a TestRule
• How to pass the url from the MockWebServer to the app in a JUnit @Before method
• How the server starts and stops before each test execution
• How to access the server object from within the custom TestRule

Open Source

EasyMVP
A full-featured framework that allows building android applications following the principles of Clean Architecture.

LandscapeVideoCamera
Powerful custom Android Camera with granular control over the video quality and filesize, restricting recordings to landscape only.

Monotweety
Simple Twitter Client just for tweeting.

Sdk-artifact-sync
A script which synchronizes all of the artifacts in your local Android SDK to a remote Maven artifact host.