This Week’s Links
Fragmented Podcast – Ep #107 – Shape shifting SVGs with Alex Lockwood
In this episode of Fragmented, Donn (@donnfelker) and Kaushik (@kaushikgopal) talk to Alex Lockwood who created shapeshifter.design, while at Google. Shape Shifter is an amazing tool that can help developers create Animated Vector Drawables without losing all their hair. Think of shapeshifter as a developer-friendly, open source After Effects alternative for Android developers. Alex talks to us about how and why he created Shape Shifter, the different tools that have evolved out of its creation, and just getting a good grasp of its working.
Double Stuffed Security in Android Oreo
Android Oreo is full of security enhancements. Over the past few months, the Android Developers blog has covered all the improvements to the security of the Android platform and its applications. Now that Oreo is out the door, this post takes a look at all the goodness inside.
The Google Assistant SDK – new languages, API updates, and Device Actions
The Google Assistant SDK lets developers embed the Google Assistant into any device with a microphone and speaker. Since first introducing the SDK, developers have come up with many innovative projects and delightful applications with Voice Kits. This week, Google introduced several new features to the Google Assistant SDK to help developers take their projects to the next level.
Task Stack
There are often occasions when developers need to take the user to a specific Activity and/or piece of content within an app. A typical use-case for this is a notification where tapping on the notification should launch the app directly to a specific place. While this is easy enough to do, the back navigation behavior from that newly launched Activity can be somewhat confusing to the user. This article takes a look at these behaviors and some strategies developers can adopt to control this navigation behavior, and make it more natural for the user.
Topic Modeling
Topic Modeling is a type of unsupervised machine learning that makes use of clustering to find latent variables or hidden structures in your data. In other words, it’s an approach for finding topics in large amounts of text. Although topic modeling is a powerful statistical method, it can be difficult to evaluate the effectiveness of a topic model or interpret the results. This article will walk through a few techniques that can help you navigate using Topic Modeling.
Android User Activity Recognition – Still, Walking, Running, Driving etc.
Detecting user activity in Android is very easy using ActivityRecognitionClient. You can detect user activities like when the user is Running, Walking, Cycling, Tilting, Driving, or just standing still. This API is used a lot in fitness apps, such as Google Fit. This article explains how to fetch user activity using a background service so that the activities can be tracked even when the app is in background.
Lessons Learned Implementing Redux on Android
While Redux may have its origins on the web, it has a lot of really good ideas behind the architecture that we can learn from and bring to Android. While the platform, languages, and tools may be different, Android and web share a lot of the same fundamental problems such as striving for complete separation of concerns between our views and business logic.
Downloadable Fonts for Android
In this post, Anita Singh, Android Developer at Winnie, explains using the newly supported Downloadable Fonts feature that was introduced with Android Oreo, when changing Winnie’s font from Roboto to Lato. Historically, using custom fonts have usually required the use of third-party libraries. Read more about her experience here.
Jobs(these are pulled from Androiddevdigest.com/jobs) Android Developer at Pac-12 Networks (San Francisco, CA (allows remote)) Full Stack Developer at Lannister Consulting (Dallas, TX) Senior/Lead Android Engineer at InVision (Remote (Work from Anywhere!)) Need to hire an Android professional? Post a job here |
Currency-Mining Android Malware is So Aggressive it can Physically Harm Phones
A newly discovered piece of Android malware carries out a litany of malicious activities, including showing an almost unending series of ads, participating in distributed denial-of-service attacks, sending text messages to any number, and silently subscribing to paid services. On of the biggest offenses is a surreptitious cryptocurrency miner that’s so aggressive it can physically damage an infected phone. Click to read more about the malware.
Google Play will only Allow Android 64-bit Apps from August 2019
Google has announced it will only permit Android apps with 64-bit support in the Play Store effective as of August 2019. This decision will force developers to retool their apps in order to stay listed in the store. This article details the new requirements needed for apps.
Recyclerview Pro Tips — Part 1
While it’s been awhile since recyclerview has been released, many developers are still making mistakes in its implementation. To curb the learning curve, read this article addressing common mistakes made when using recyclerview.
Video
Caster.IO Using the Android Studio ADB IDEA Plugin
The ADB IDEA Plugin speeds up your daily Android development by providing shortcuts to common operations. In this video learn the three different ways that you can access the commands via: Find Actions, Quick Operations Popup and the Menu Bar.
Caster.IO The Decorator Pattern
The Decorator pattern allows you to easily compose objects by ‘decorating’ an instance with other decorators. Learn how to build a decorator in this lesson. The Decorator is one of the most important and useful design patters defined by the Gang of Four: it allows a single instance of an object to increase its functionality, without modifying either its source or affecting the other instances of the same class. And respecting the SOLID principles as well!
Open Source
Calendar Picker
In this Calendar PIcker, developers can preset a selected day, and can customize almost all text size, color, bg color, and month title.
VersionKontrol
Use this tiny Kotlin library to determine if a version string is newer when compared to another.