This Week’s Links
Fragmented Podcast – Ep #145: Tracking Network Requests With x-Request-ID
In this short Fragmented podcast, Kaushik (@kaushikgopal) explains how you can trace network requests from your app by adding a special header. Easily trace an HTTP request all the way from a client to your backend web process.
Android Pie à la mode: Security & Privacy
Is there a better time to discuss Android dessert releases than the holidays? And what is one of the favorite desserts during the holiday season? Well, pie of course. This post has a summary of all the security and privacy features introduced in Android Pie this year.
Google+ APIs shutting down March 7, 2019
As part of the sunset of Google+ for consumers, Google will be shutting down all Google+ APIs effective March 7, 2019. This will be a progressive shutdown beginning in late January, so we are advising all developers reliant on the Google+ APIs that calls to those APIs may start to intermittently fail as early as January 28, 2019. Read this post for more details.
Rialto: Downloadable Fonts
Rialto is a new Android text styling library based upon Annotation Spans. Rialto enables you to provide consistent text formatting throughout your app by using annotations in your string resources. This post announced, the release of Rialto 1.2.0 which contains another (hopefully!) useful new feature.
Google Adds Incognito Mode to YouTube Android App
Google has become adept at looking at your online activities to build a profile on you. This information is not only used to serve adds, but it also affects the content you see on services like YouTube and traditional search. While browsers have private browsing modes to disassociate your actions with your profile, that has not been an option in the YouTube Android app, until now. Read more about the release of this feature in this post.
Jobs(these are pulled from www.androidjobs.io) Android Developer at Big Nerd Ranch (Atlanta, GA. Remote) Need to hire an Android professional? Post a job here |
In reviews we trust — Making Google Play ratings and reviews more trustworthy
Google Play ratings and reviews are extremely important in helping users decide which apps to install. Unfortunately, fake and misleading reviews can undermine users’ trust in those ratings. In this post, read how Google tries to make sure that the ratings and reviews shown in the Play store are not being manipulated.
Android developer top news of 2018
Read this post for year in review of top Android news for 2018 from Mobile Hackers.io.
The Android Launch Mode Animated CheatSheet
Before API 11, we used activities show every new page on the screen. Now with Fragments and the navigation tools in API 28, it’s totally possible to make a very complex app with only one activity. Dive into the world of Launch Mode in this post!
Videos
Caster.io: Build a Google Assistant App with DialogFlow: Making your DialogFlow action smarter by editing the training phrases from the users usage
Every person is different, and each one will have their own way of expressing themselves. For that reason, it’s quite hard to cover all the possible phrases that the users might use to represent an intent.
In those cases, when the phrase isn’t mapped to an intent, the fallback intent will be called. DialogFlow will store all the phrases that were used, and display with a warning those that aren’t mapped. Then is very easy to map those phrases to your intents and make your action smarter.
Caster.io: Build a Google Assistant App with DialogFlow: Having a better understanding of the Welcome and Fallback intents in DialogFlow
As shown before, the welcome intent and fallback intent are created as default when you start the DialogFlow action project. The welcome intent is triggered by the welcome event, so it will be called everytime your action is initialized. The fallback intent is triggered when no intent is mapped to the phrase the user provided.
Open Source
Stickers
This library provides a simple way for you to drop in your sticker art for WhatsApp and build an Android app with minimal development or coding experience needed customers to load your stickers.
StfalconImageViewer
A simple and customizable full-screen image viewer with shared image transition support, “pinch to zoom” and “swipe to dismiss” gestures. Compatible with all of the most popular image processing libraries such as Picasso, Glide etc.