This Weeks Links
In this second installment of our Fragment (a.k.a mini-episode), we thought we’ll do our listeners a favor and help with the reading of Joshua Bloch’s ‘Effective Java’ book. We introduce the very first of these venerable “Items”: Consider providing static factory methods instead of constructors.
Adventures after Google I/O-4(Databinging)
Apart from NDK builds, Databinding is one of the most surprising announcement from android developer tools team. It takes away one more boilerplate coding from developers, and enables proper abstraction regarding to MVC patterns. Find out more on databinding from Prasham Trivedi
Splash screen with any other name is still a splash screen – and they suck!
Strong opinion? Find out why splash screens/launch screens are creating unhappy Android developers!
Low-overhead rendering with Vulkan
Developers of games and 3D graphics applications have one key challenge to meet: How complex a scene can they draw in a small fraction of a second? Learn how Vulkan is addressing some of the sources of CPU overhead and explicit control over rendering
The 7 Best Mockup Tools for App Entrepreneurs
Thankfully, app entrepreneurs have been gifted with an abundance of options to choose from when it comes to selecting a top-quality mockup tool to use. This article could be useful for developers or clients alike
Vertical Scrolling in Story Maker 2
Deciding on the best swipe method for cross-cultural apps. LTR or RTL? Storymaker designers explain their rationale for vertical scrolling in their latest app.
Gradle Release Notes – Version 2.6
The Gradle development team is excited to release Gradle 2.6, with some shiny new features and many under the hood improvements. Find out more in these release notes
Exploring Google Eddystone with the Proximity Beacon API
Google recently announced the release of their cross-platform BLE Beacon format. Here we look at what we can do with it and how to use this new API to manage our beacons
How Google Play Security Still Falls Short
Nearly every month, Android owners encounter fresh news of serious security breaches to Google’s mobile platform, with the StageFright hack and the porn clicker Trojan just the latest, worrying revelations.
Android animations
Android comes with built-in support for animations in the core of the platform. There is a class called Animation.AnimationListener wich provides tons of helpers to animate many aspects of an Androi app. Let’s take a look at it.
For posterity: How to render HTML in a textview and handle link clicks
Nothing earth-shattering in this post, but maybe this will help you if you run into this seemingly trivial problem. You have a string of Html. It probably has all the html tags. You want to render this string of Html in a TextView. You also want to know when a link is clicked so you can do something with it.
Discover Android Secret Codes for Samsung smartphones and others
Android secret codes are numeric or symbolic sequences entered in your dialer application that let you to access manufacturers’ secret menus hidden. Find out common and not so common codes here
Android Experiments: A celebration of creativity and code
We set out to find a way to celebrate the creative, experimental Android work of developers everywhere and inspire more developers to get creative with technology and code. Android Experiments is a showcase of inspiring projects on Android and an open invitation for all developers to submit their own experiments to the gallery.
FlatBuffers in Android – introduction
Several days ago Facebook announced big performance improvement in data handling in its Android app. It was connected with dropping JSON format and replacing it with FlatBuffers in almost entire app. Please check this article to get some basic knowledge about FlatBuffers and results of transition to it from JSON
Face Detection in Google Play services
With the release of Google Play services 7.8, we announced the addition of new Mobile Vision APIs, which includes a new Face API that finds human faces in images and video better and faster than before. This API is also smarter at distinguishing faces at different orientations and with different facial features facial expressions.
Android Developer Story: Zabob Studio and Buff Studio reach global users with Google Play
South Korean Games developers Zabob Studio and Buff Studio are start-ups seeking to become major players in the global mobile games industry.
Google Play services 7.8 – Let’s see what’s Nearby!
In this release, we’ve added two new APIs. The Nearby Messages API allows you to build simple interactions between nearby devices and people, while the Mobile Vision API helps you create apps that make sense of the visual world, using real-time on-device vision technology
AndroidStudio Tips – How to make subfolders in AndroidStudio
In this video find out how to make a subfolders for your pictures/layouts/etc in AndroidStudio
Curved Motion – Part 2
In the previous article we looked at how easy it is to add arcMotion to a Scene transition to get a nice curve when moving a View between two positions. But very few developers, at the time of writing this article, are lucky enough to be able to specify minSdkVersion=”21″ and so be able to use this technique. However there is a really neat way that we can get very similar behaviour back to API 11 (Honeycomb) which is almost as easy.
Favoring Snackbars Over Security
Opinions surrounding Android security flaws
Iconify just got a lot better
Overcoming laborious colour/size changes for icons
Testing Your Apps with AWS Device Farm
You move through five steps (at most) and then your app will be tested on the devices you choose. Simple to set up and like most AWS products comes with free tier usage.
Barcode Detection in Google Play services
With the release of Google Play services 7.8 we’re excited to announce that we’ve added new Mobile Vision APIs which provides the Barcode Scanner API to read and decode a myriad of different barcode types quickly, easily and locally
Android Studio 1.4 Preview 1 in Canary Channel
1.4 Preview 1 on the canary channel! In addition to a large number of bug fixes, 1.4 contains the following new features including new theme editor, two new performance monitors, vector assist wizard, link improvements, IDE quickfixes and basic support for Doxygen comments in code completion on APIs in the C++ editor
Android Integrating Google Analytics V4
Have you ever wondered how to track your android user activity in real time? If yes, well here is the solution you are looking for.
A Gentle Introduction to Application Security
the second your code is deployed in production, your code is the front line of defense for that entire system and quite possibly the entire network. Logically, that means the software you produce must be made reasonably secure. Application Security is Every Developer’s Responsibility
Face Detection With Android Vision API
With the release of Google Play Services comes Android Vision API which includes Face Detection. It can detect faces at different orientations, certain points on faces called Landmarks, probability of eyes open and probability of smiling. How to build a face detection into your app
How We Solved Our Dick Pic Problem
If you’re considering building any type of social platform with picture capabilities, the thought’s probably crossed your mind: “What about the dick pics?” (Admittedly, the thought of dick pics probably crosses your mind regardless, but that’s beside the point.)
Yahoo Advanced Android Series – Interface Performance Profiling and Optimization
[VIDEO] Eric Petzel from Airbnb presented at Yahoo on Aug 11th, 2015 about why performance profiling is so important, common causes of slow apps, and gives an overview of the tools available to profile your applications.
Android UI tests with Espresso
Simulating user interactions on Android apps
Why every member in your team is a UX Designer
Many people claim there’s a big difference between a UX Designer and a UI Designer. It’s true, but in reality, the UX is designed only by the collaborative work of the entire team. Find out more here
The No-Nonsense Guide to Growing Your Mobile App
[PDF]. Guidance from Google on best practice for rapid growth of your app.
Open Source Section
Whiskey is a Java HTTP library based on nio and intended especially to address the needs of Android mobile clients. It has no external dependencies.
WatchTower
A sample application created to test, explore and demonstrate the Proximity Beacon API
material-guidelines
This is a text-only, numbered documenation of the Material Design Guidelines
Android-TextView-Click-Bug-Sample
Sample app to show a possible bug(s) in TextView.class
Parse-SDK-Android
A library that gives you access to the powerful Parse cloud platform from your Android app
qksms
QKSMS is an open source replacement to the stock messaging app on Android.
scaloid
Scaloid is a library that simplifies your Android code. It makes your code easy to understand and maintain by leveraging Scala language.
PermissionsDispatcher
PermissionsDispatcher provides simple annotation-based API to handle runtime permissions in Android M. You can be released from the burden that writing a bunch of check statements whether a permission have been granted or not.