Summer Break is Over!
We had a small summer break of a couple weeks lately and now the kids are back in school and with that comes the weekly goodness that is the Android Dev Digest. This week we have TONS of good stuff from the Android Team. They’re literally dropping new stuff multiple times a day.
Enjoy !
Styling Android – Gradle Build Part 7
This series is shaping up to be quite the authority on Gradle for folks looking to perform builds with Gradle. Part 7 is now available:
Consuming Device Notifications with the NotificationListenerService
This post demonstrates how you can use the new NotificationListenerService in Android 4.3 to consume device notifications. The author then shows you how you can use this as a Dashclock extension.
Dashclock
Looking for a good example of how to build a home screen lock widget? Look no further than Dashclock, the open source replacement lock screen for Android 4.2 and above. Learn how to display local weather, your next calendar appointment, missed called, and more with this beautiful new lock screen.
Making Apps Beautiful Part 2
In this video Ankur Kotwal and Jan-Felix Schmakeit continue the series on how to make your apps beautiful.
Implicit Intents
With Android 4.3 we have restricted profiles and now there is some new guidance around how you should check to see if your app can perform certain actions with implicit intents. Read more about it here:
Foreground Services Update
If you have an application that has a service that runs in the foreground (re: startForeground()) you will want to read this update on the new behavior that is exhibited with notifications and foreground services.
Responsive Design
Nick Butcher covers the key points in which all devs need to think about when developing applications that will eventually be used on tablets and phones.
Fixing Overdraw Issues with Hierarchy Viewer
Learn about the Hierarchy Viewer tool (which can help a TON when debugging layout issues) to help fix overdraw issues.
Making your app Multi-User Friendly
Are you hardcoding paths in your application such as “/sdcard” or “/data/data/com.mypackage”? If so you should read this #ProTip from Fred Chung.
Flattening icons with Photoshop
Some of us are responsible for apps that are quite old and sometimes those apps have old icons that need to get upgraded from their old state to the new flat design guidelines in order to fit in the action bar correctly. This DesignBytes episodes covers how to update the icons accordingly.
Google I/IO 2013 App Source Code Now Available
The Android team has released the source code for the Google I/O 2013 Android app. This code includes some examples of how to use fragments properly in regards to responsive design which will work correctly in a phone context as well as a tablet context. It also includes the ActionBarCompat library as well (as well as many others like Volley).