This Week’s Links
Fragmented Podcast – 141: Impostor Syndrome
In this mini episode, Donn (@donnfelker) and Kaushik (@kaushikgopal) talk about Impostor Syndrome. Most developers are plagued by this. Does this feeling ever go away? How do we deal with this? Listen to this short episode to find out more.
Combating Potentially Harmful Applications with Machine Learning at Google: Datasets and Models
In the past, Google has talked about how machine learning can be used combat Potentially Harmful Applications (PHAs). This week, Google is talking about how machine learning techniques can be used to detect and classify PHAs.
AnnotationSpans – Part 1
In this series about annotations, learn about a really interesting technique for applying spans to text. With an API that has been there since API 1, this post takes a closer look at how to use this incredibly powerful API.
The Future of Android Unfolds
Last week, a few nerds at Big Nerd Ranch attended the 2018 Android Dev Summit . While the conference covered multiple topics, the biggest piece of news was support for foldable devices. Foldables provide a new user experience – while folded, apps on the the device should prioritize quick and easy access. Users can then unfold a device to get a tablet-like experience with more info and context for the current activity. Read more about what was revealed at the conference in this post.
Building Text Detection Apps for Android using React-Native
In the world that’s still transitioning from inventions of the Renaissance to inventions of the modern technological era, many archaic steps information storage can be eradicated right away. Through writing a simple app that can detect all text present on a business card, the information can be stored in your contact list with ease. Read how to code this app with React-Native in this post.
The Reality of Migrating to AndroidX
This year, Google rebranded the support Android libraries to Android Jetpack (aka AndroidX). Particularly pertinent to developers was how they repackaged all the libraries. Not only have their maven coordinates changed, but the package names for every class has changed as well. Read more about the challenges of migrating to AndroidX in this post.
What You Didn’t Know About Arrays in Kotlin
In Java world, lists are preferable to arrays, which is also suggested in Effective Java. In Kotlin, you may want to do the same. Read more about Arrays in Kotlin in this article.
Back to Basics: Navigation
In this post, go back to basics with in-app navigation. If you want to be able to create fully reusable screens, you must make sure they know nothing about the navigational flow they’re in. The same goes for these flows themselves: a flow can be a fully reusable component that groups a certain set of screens.
Combining Realm, RxJava, Retrofit and Kotlin to Create a Data-safe Server Request Chain in Android— Part 1
After completing an overhaul of the way they download data from our server to our application, including the combination of Retrofit requests, using RxJava to chain the operations along, saving the data to RealmDB and cleaning things up with Kotlin extension functions, Michael Krakauer, developer at Trax wanted to share their process. Read more about it in this article.
Video
Caster.io: Storing Data in Android with Room: Introduction and Integration
Room DB is provided as part of the Android Architecture Components libraries and aims to simplify how you persist data in your app. In this lesson, we’ll demonstrate how to get started with Room by adding the required dependencies to our build.gradle file; this will ensure our project has everything required so that Room can be used.
Caster.io: Storing Data in Android with Room: Creating the Database
This lesson will demonstrate how to create a Room database, walking you through the Kotlin code required to define a database and obtain an instance of the database whenever it is required.
Open Source
RandomGenKt
This is a Kotlin port of the Java library designed to generate random instances of any class. This is great for demoing your app with interesting content, manually testing it with varying data, and even populating it with smart, random generated data in production.
NomtekUtills
Collection of tools for Android development. Tools include a Toolbar Controller and a Status Bar Controller. Detailed instructions are available for each tool in the How to use sections.