This Week’s Links

Fragmented Podcast Episode 86: Working Effectively with Legacy Code
Donn (@donnfelker) talks about the book Working Effectively with Legacy code and how it helped shape him as a developer, consultant and team member. He also shares tips and tricks on how to get going with an existing code base that you may have just started working with.

Reduce Friction with the New Location APIs
The Google Play services SDK includes a new way to access Location Services, which do not require your app to manually manage a connection to Google Play services, and reduces boilerplate and common pitfall in your app.

Couple of Great Apps for Designers
Two apps apps with useful tools for Designer Tools package multiple helpful features into one app. Features include grid overlay to check alignment, semi-transparent mock overlay, and a color picker. The other app is Faiz’s Keyline Pushing app, which provides much finer controls for keylines.

Adaptive Icons and More
Mark Allison explains one of the new features in the Android O preview, Adaptive Icons. Adaptive Icons are one feature developers can implement now, and will benefit users as they get Android O on their devices.

Recognizing Android Excellence on Google Play
In an effort to recognize the hard-working developers, Google Play announced Android Excellence this week. The new collections will showcase apps and games that deliver incredible user experiences on Android, use many of Google Play’s best practices, and have great design, technical performance, localization, and device optimization.

Android Things for Beginners
The Tengio crew got together some shiny new hardware to play with the recently announced Android Things. If you’re interested in learning more, check out the tutorials listed on their site.

How to Add Push Notification Capability to Your Android App
Push notifications are important. In this blog post from Firebase, learn how to add everything from generating tokens to receiving and displaying notifications on your app!

WannaCry Lookalike Ransomware Hits Android Devices
The OpenSource blog is warning Android users about the new ransomware spreading as an app via Chinese gaming forums has been surfaced on Android. Named WannaLocker, the ransomware makes users believe that they have been infected by the recently reported WannaCry.

A First Walk into Kotlin Coroutines on Android
Antonio Leiva gives a look into Coroutines for Kotlin. A powerful feature of Kotlin, Coroutines are a language feature that can be implemented in different ways to solve different problems.

Exploring Kotlin’s Hidden Costs – Part 2
In Part 2 of Cristophe B.’s series on Kotlin’s hidden costs, he explores local functions, null safety and varargs. A link to Part 1 of the series is included.

User Testing Android Apps
The Google Design blog on Medium gives insight into successful user testing for Android Apps.

Jobs (these are pulled from Androiddevdigest.com/jobs) Senior Mobile Developer at iFit (Logan, UT: On-Site or Remote) We do remote teams right. Join a great company that is growing fast AND with the right work/life balance. iFit focuses on connecting everybody to everything fitness. We love software that talks to real things. [Apply Today] Need to hire an Android professional? Post a job here

Videos

Caster.IO Getting Started by Git in Android Studio
Did you know that Android Studio ships with Version Control support? In particular, it has excellent functionality for interacting with your Android applications using Git. In this lesson we’ll explore how we can initialize a Git repository and the various options available in the Version Control tool window. We will briefly mention Changelists as well. We’ll talk more about them however in a future lesson. I wanted to make sure we covered each item in the Version Control toolbar now.

Caster.IO Our First Commit with Git in Android Studio
In this lesson we’re going to make our first Git commit in Android Studio. We will look at the Local Changes tab and how we can ascertain the status of our files based on their colors. We will also learn how we can commit changes through the Commit Changes dialog window.

Caster.IO Viewing Git Changes in Android Studio
In this lesson we’re going to analyze project and file changes with Git, in Android Studio. We will look at the Log tab in the Version Control tool window and all that it has to offer. Further, we’ll explore file changes with the Differences Viewer window. Let’s get to it!

Open Source

ShimmerRecyclerView
In this post from The Android Arsenal find out to include  a shimmer effect in RecyclerView.

NumberPadTimePicker
Remember the time picker from the AOSP Clock app in Jelly Bean? In this post, find the code for a familiar, but improved design.