This Weeks Links

Your user can’t click your Floating Action Button
Floating action buttons (or FAB) are a special case of promoted actions.Unfortunately, Assistive technologies such as a screen reader can cause issues for your floating action button. In this post you will learn how to use accessibilityTraversalBefore to ensure the users of assistive technologies can still use your floating action button.

Retrofitting Espresso
Espresso is a great testing instrument and it usually knows when it’s okay to perform the next operation. However, Espresso can have difficulty knowing when to wait for background processes. In this article you will learn how you can tell Espresso to wait for those processes without needing to use sleep() calls .

Effects of Java’s Synthetic Accessor Methods in Android
Java supports nested classes, which are a way of logically grouping classes that are only used in one place, increasing encapsulation and producing more readable and maintainable code.  This article asks and explores the questions: Does Java have true nesting classes?

Take a crack at React Native with Kyle Banks
React Native was developed by Facebook and provides developers with a tool to write native Android and iOS applications using JavaScript. In this article, Kyle Banks, will introduce you to React Native before showing you how set it up and get started.

App Indexing – Let’s index your apps
Search engine often struggle to find content which is available within apps. However, Google has now introduced app indexing which allows users to directly launch and view content within your app from the search results This post takes and in depth look into what app indexing is and how it works. You will also learn how to implement app indexing in you android applications.

State propagation in Android with RxJava Subjects
A common problem often encountered in large projects is designing your app to react when pieces of your application are modified within your UI or application. In this article, you will take a look at the common solutions and a the better option of using the Store component approach.

ConstraintLayout Chains – Part 2
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. Part 2 looks at inside spread chains, how they differ from standard spread chains and how to implement them.

Android, Kotlin & Sqlite = A slice of awesomeness
Kotlin is a statically-typed JVM language, developed by JetBrains, with a syntax more expressive and concise than that of Java. This post provides a starter guide on Android Development using Kotlin.

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Implementing Search Filter Animation in Kotlin
Irina Galata, helped develop an app called Fit which would be similar to a mix of  Quora and Linkedin. The app would need to allow users to post both questions and job vacancies.In this post Irina shares the teams experience of implimenting filters to make sure users can quickly find questions and jobs they are looking for and how they developed their search filter animation in Kotlin.

Adding TV channels to your app with the TIF Companion Library
This TV Input Framework (TIF) on Android allows developers to create their own TV input service, following the best practices for Android TV. This post will introduce and help you get started using the TV Input Framework Companion Library, which includes a number of helper methods and classes to simplify the development process.

An overly thorough guide to underused Android Libraries
Many problems developers encounter have already been solved. Rather than “reinvent the wheel” we often use libraries and bits of code written by others. The Android community has created some top-of-the-line libraries that can save you tons of coding work, but how do you know which ones to use? This guide will help you decide and show you how to get started using  some of the best ones.

Finally understanding how references work in Android and Java
A reference is what is used to describe the pointer to the memory location where an Object resides.This article explores what memory references are, the different types of references and how they can they be applied.

Introducing the Google Slides API
Google Slides is an online presentation tool which is part of the Google Docs suite. It was previewed at Google I/O 2016 and API v1 has now been released. This article provides useful info and resource links to help you get started using the API.l

50 Android Studio tips, tricks & resources
This article will provide you with 50 useful tips, tricks, shortcuts and resources for Android Studio that will help improve your overall efficiency as an Android Developer.

Android platform distribution, November 2016
With the release of Nougat, it is time to take a quick glance at how the Android platform distribution stands. Other than Nougat appearing with a 0.3% presence, the only other major change is Marshmallow, which surged 5.3 points to 24% of total devices.

Videos

CasterIO Lesson 120: Mockito – What Makes a Good Unit Test
This lesson describes the various characteristics of a good unit test.

In this lesson you will learn:

• What makes a test a *good* unit test
• Introduction to phrase “test doubles”
• Why a unit test should be fast to execute
• Why the outcome of a unit test should give you the same result every time the test is run
• Why the unit test shouldn’t rely on components external to the test which could be in an invalid state and cause unexpected failures in the test
• What is a “unit”? How many classes should a unit test interact with.

Caster.IO Lesson 121: MockWebServer: Error Conditions
MockWebServer makes it easy to test how your app reacts to various error conditions. We will look into three different cases in this demo.

In this lesson you will learn:

• How to have MockWebServer respond with an error code
• How to have MockWebServer respond with malformed JSON
• How to have MockWebServer throttle its response body

Caster.IO Lesson 122: MockWebServer – Verifying Server Requests
Verify that our app sends the expected request to the server. This is very difficult to do with manual testing, but very easy with MockWebServer.

In this lesson you will learn:

• How to obtain a RecordedRequest from MockWebServer
• How to verify the path of the request

Telling Android Studio a string contains a regular expression
A short video showing that you can tell Android Studio that a Java string contains a regular expression. After you do this you get syntax checking on your regexp, as well as a way to test your regexp directly in the editor.

Open Source

RxLocation
Reactive Location APIs Library for Android and RxJava 2

Scatter-PieChart
Easy and simple implementation of PieChart with Scatter

Blaze
Perfect for Moving and Zooming Image for android