This Week’s Links

Fragmented Podcast – Ep #113: Chatting with Pinterest’s Christina Lee 
In this episode Donn (@donnfelker) and Kaushik (@kaushikgopal) catch up with a highly energetic but sick Christina Lee about the delightful details in the Pinterest app, delving with the dark side (Swift), giving live coding presentation talks and touching on some Kotlin details like covariance and contravariance. Listen for a power-packed 40 minutes.

RecyclerView Animations – Moving Items​
In this post, learn about RecyclerView, a really useful way of displaying content in list form, particularly when the content is dynamic and/or there are large numbers of items. One thing that can be really useful is that we get some really nice animations for free provided we implement our Adapter correctly. In this short series take a look at the right way to modify the contents of a RecyclerView.Adapter in order to get these animations for free.

A Better Way to Track Your Promotions on Google Play Billing
Promotions can be a valuable tool to increase user engagement or attract new users by offering content or features to a limited number of users free of charge. This week Google announced an improvement in the Google Play Developer API that makes it easier to track your promotions from your own backend. Find out more in this post.

Ruby’s New JIT​
While there have been many attempts at implementing a JIT for CRuby, the reference implementation of Ruby. Now they have successfully merged. An optional --jit flag will increase startup time and take more memory in exchange for blazing speed once warmed up. Find out more how to use it in this post.

Google Launches Gmail Go for Android​
Google has introduced Gmail Go, the newest addition to its line of “Go” apps that are slimmed down versions of their original counterparts. Meant for phones with basic specifications and lower-end processors, or places with poor connectivity or expensive cellular data prices, the Go apps take up less space on smartphones while still providing basic functionalities.

Flutter — 5 Reasons Why You May Love It
Announced at Google I/O ’17 Flutter is a new open source library for creating mobile applications. Flutter is a solution for creating cross-platform mobile applications with beautiful UI. Flutter’s way of designing views is similar to the web applications, so you can find many analogies to HTML/CSS. Read more about it in this blog post.

Android Studio and Git Branches – How to Simplify Your Work
If you’re getting irritated by having too many branches in your repo, check out this article that explains out to tame the mess and cut them down in one shot. Learn more tips and tricks in this article.

For Developers, the Focus is Deep Learning, Multiplatform, and Coding Skills
According to a new survey, developers are spending more time on cross-platform development, deep learning and acquiring new skills. Read more about the trends in developers in this article.

Jobs (these are pulled from Androiddevdigest.com/jobs) Android Engineer at Scoop (San Francisco, CA) Scoop brings co-workers and neighbors together into a smooth carpooling experience. Built around solid engineering principles and standard tools like RxJava and Retrofit, our app needs talented Android engineers to power through rapid growth! [Apply Today] Android Developer at Badoo (London, UK) We’re looking for Android Developers to work within our highly experienced team, delivering key product features on our global product with over 370 million registered users! [Apply Today] Need to hire an Android professional? Post a job here

GDS Updates Best Practices for Building Government APIs
The Government Digital Service (GDS) has updated its best practices for developers to follow when building APIs for public services. The department emphasizes the the Technology Code of Practice, which gives guidelines for building government technology. Read the article to see what’s new.

LineageOS 13, based on Android Marshmallow, is now discontinued
CyanogenMod 13, based on Android 6.0 Marshmallow, first arrived in November 2015. It was soon switched to Android 6.0.1, and continued to be the main branch of CyanogenMod until version 14.1 was released one year later. After the CyanogenMod community re-organized into LineageOS, the distribution was renamed to LineageOS 13. Now, most of the devices have either been updated, or have never been activated. Please see the list in the article to find which devices are affected.

Videos

Caster.IO Functional Black Box Testing with Readers​
Our main goal with the Reader has been to implicitly pass down our dependencies along the whole execution tree. We talked about the possibility to use that as a way to mock dependencies at testing time.

Caster.IO Dependency Injection with the Reader
Dependency Injection is needed on any app, since you must be able to replace collaborators for your classes at testing time by using test doubles. Arrow provides the Reader to solve this concern.

Open Source

Fluid Slider Android
Check out this source code that will allow you to add a slider widget with a popup bubble displaying selected value to your next project.

Sneaker
Download Sneaker in order to create custom alerts for your app with this lightweight Android library.