This Weeks Links

Meet 5 Android Developers Working to Improve Lives Around the World
In this blog post meet five developers endeavoring to make a difference in the world. From ending world hunger to fighting dementia, check out how these apps are making a positive social impact.

What’s New from Firebase at Google I/O 2017
Francis Ma, Firebase Group Product Manager, recaps all the exciting releases on the Firebase platform, and gives details about the new Alpha program, where developers will have the opportunity to test and give feedback on new products. Includes instructions for how to sign up for the Alpha program.

Announcing the Women Techmakers Udacity Scholarship
To encourage more women to seek more tech degrees, Women Techmakers is awarding scholarships for women around the world to increase their skills through enrolling in an online technical degree. There are four categories of scholarships including Android Basics, Android Developer, Front-End Web Developer, and Full-Stack Developer.

ViewPagerAnimator – The Internals
In this blog post, Mark Allison gives readers a look inside his ViewPagerAnimator, which he designed to animate arbitrary values as the user navigates between pages with in a ViewPager, and will precisely follow the motion of the user’s finger.

How We Make Sure Our Source Code Meets Our High Standards
Caitlin Cleveland on the Big Nerd Ranch blog explains the rigorous process that their code must go through in their development process. Each of the five-step process that helps them produce high-quality code is explained.

Android Devs: You’ve Handled Activity Recreation. What About Process Recreation?
Wesley Moy writes on the Medium blog about simple app called Process Spam, to help Android developers utilize activity recreation and process recreation to understand what happens during process death, and strategies for handling process death when it occurs.

How to Earn and “A” Android Accessibility
The blog post explores best-practices, tips, and references that will help ensure the app you’re developing is fully accessible to users who are visually impaired using Android via Talkback.

Here’s How You Can Make a 360 VR App in 10 Minutes with Unity
A step-by-step guide to building a 360 VR app. This tutorial will teach you the skills necessary to take you one step closer to building a VR video app.

Beautiful Animations Using Android ConstraintLayout
Jinya Cao from the Robinhood Engineering blog explains how to implement animations on a page that uses ConstraintLayout with the transition framework, allowing developers to condense your UI/animation logic in your Activity/Fragment and consolidate them in XML.

Using Kotlin to Make Android APIs Fun Again
The Signal v. Noise blog shares some of their favorite ways to leverage extension functions in Kotlin. Extensions include: Read an Asset file into a String, Set View Visibility, and Retrieving a Color Resource Across API Levels and more.

Using Gradle Script for Kotlin for Android
In this post from the Medium blog, Arturo Gutierrez outlines instructions for an Android project using Gradle Kotlin Script to create Gradle build scripts written in Kotlin. This process makes it easier to modify Gradle scripts without making mistakes via the integration of autocomplete.

Mutable vals in Kotlin
Dan Lew of the Dan Lew Codes blog gives and in-depth explanation on the distinction between val and var. Hint, it might not be what you thought it was!

Google Updates Play Store Developer Policies, Provides Additional Information on Malicious Behavior, Ratings Manipulation, and More
The Android Police blog outlines the Google Play policies that have been updated recently. Google has revised the Malicious Behavior Policy and the Ratings Reviews, and Installs Policy, as well as introducing additional policy requirements for Instant Apps.

Videos

Android Architecture Components: Transforming Live Data
Create custom transformations on top of your data as well as apply default functions to it such as map and switchMap.

Android Architecture Components: Advanced Features of Live Data
LiveData is a powerful tool, but we just scratched the surface of what they can do: they can actually do pretty amazing (and totally leak-proof) things with a very little effort.

Android Architecture Components: Observing the Lifecycle
Lifecycle is a familiar concept on Android, but we never had the power of observing it like we can do now. With the new tools just announced, we can take full advantage of the idea behind the lifecycle to make or component aware of the status of the application.

Android Architecture Components: Combining ViewModel and LiveData
ViewModels and LiveData are now a familiar concept, but they were not meant to be alone: they are really powerful when they are combined, giving us the possibility to listen to updates even upon configuration changes.

Android Architecture Components: LiveData
LiveData works more or less like Observables, but they have the peculiarity of automatically managing the subscriptions of the observers by listening to any lifecycle.

Android Architecture Components: ViewModel
ViewModels are an important part of the new Architecture Components suite: they help you achieve a better and cleaner code by handling the configuration changes and the lifecycle of the Activity (or Fragment) to which they are attached.

Open Source

kotlin-android-mvp-starter
Create/generate your Kotlin MVP projects easily with this Android Kotlin starter project which implements MVP Pattern.

swipe-button
Includes a library of Android buttons activated by swipe. These buttons are easy to use and will make your app look great.

sdk-artifact-sync
A Python script which synchronizes all of the artifacts in your local Android SDK to a remote Maven artifact host. This script synchronizes these artifacts to a remote artifact host of your choice. This will allow your build tools to resolve and cache these artifacts automatically.

IdealMedia music player
An app to listen to music, audiobooks either on your device and online at vk.com. Player includes search, download, set as ringtone, sort by albums and more.

ShapeRipple
A library of ripple-like animations with cool tweaks on the go. Includes ability to create a custom shape ripple.