This Weeks Links

Automating Screenshots: Simplifying Internationalization on Android
Internationalization presents its own set of challenges. Donn Felker reviews an open source tool called screengrab, a tool that he says any pragmatic Android developer should evaluate as a possible candidate for their Android development toolbox – especially if your app is internationalized.

Fragmented Podcast Episode 027 – Realm Realm Realm your boat (with Christian)
Realm pro and overall genius Christian Melchior joins us in this episode to talk about all things Realm. Get an inside look at Realm from concept to production.

Realm in Android – simple example
Mateusz Budzar provides a very simple project and troubleshooting tips to show how the Realm database works and how to use it.

Android Studio 2.0 Beta: What’s New?
The goal for Android Studio 2.0: Make everything ten times faster. Faster builds, faster deployment, faster emulators. Here is a glimpse of the new features

[TUT] Send app data to a web spreadsheet (Google Sheets)
This tutorial from Blundell explains how you can take input in an Android application and easily upload it to a spreadsheet.

The Android Wearable Computing Revolution Begins
After smartphones, smart watches are the next in thing. So what exactly in Android Wear? What are its functionalities? How can you make your own app? All these question are answered for you, in this blog post.

Android Wear : Develop Your First App
This continuation from the previous blog expands on the creation of your first Android Wear app with a guide to getting Started, creating the UI and testing your app.

How to get started with Google’s Text to Speech & Speech to Text in Android
Android Ver 1.6 onwards provides some awesome features called Text to Speech (TTS) and Speech to Text (STT), this post shows you how to apply and implement them.

Android Widgets – A Couple of Gotchyas
Darren from AfterEcho talks bugs in the system and a work around for loading widget images asynchronously in Jelly Bean.

Hexawhat Architecture?
Paul Blundell frames his discussion from an Android perspective as he tries to explain hexagonal architecture in its simplest form, the way he understands it so far.

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Visualiser – Part 2
While a visual representation of the currently playing audio stream is fairly easy to do, there are a couple of pain points on the way which, if you don’t know about them, can make the task much harder. Mark Allison get’s stuck in to the code. Part 1 previously looked at how we can register to receive callbacks containing waveform data and in this concluding part we’ll look at how we can actually display that data

Android Building Realtime Chat App using GCM, PHP & MySQL – Part 1
Ravi Tamada says Google Cloud Messaging is one of the best alternatives to Parse when it comes to building Realtime Chat App’s. Take a look at his extensive guide for combining GCM with PHP & MySQL. Part 1 covers the server side implementation of the app ie. the REST API client and a simple admin panel.

Android Building Realtime Chat App using GCM, PHP & MySQL – Part 2
Ravi Tamada says Google Cloud Messaging is one of the best alternatives to Parse when it comes to building Realtime Chat App’s. Take a look at his extensive guide for combining GCM with PHP & MySQL. Part 2 takes you through building the android app with GCM integration.

Android Building Realtime Chat App using GCM, PHP & MySQL – Part 3
Ravi Tamada says Google Cloud Messaging is one of the best alternatives to Parse when it comes to building Realtime Chat App’s. Take a look at his extensive guide for combining GCM with PHP & MySQL. Part 3 concludes with building the remaining modules.

What’s under the hood of the OkHttp’s cache?
One of the nicest features of OkHttp is its caching mechanism. In this post Jesse Wilson will go through all relevant steps in caching and explain how it works

OkHttp Certificate Pinning Vulnerability!
Jesse Wilson advises that If you’re using OkHttp, you should upgrade to the latest version immediately!

RxAndroid Basics: Part 1
So you’re a little curious about this RxJava stuff and how it applies to Android. Kurtis Nusbaum has thrown together a few examples based on his findings. The hope is these examples will provide you with the necessary knowledge to begin using RxJava in your Android apps. Part 1 outlines some basic examples.

RxAndroid Basics: Part 2
So you’re a little curious about this RxJava stuff and how it applies to Android. Kurtis Nusbaum has thrown together a few examples based on his findings. The hope is these examples will provide you with the necessary knowledge to begin using RxJava in your Android apps. Part 2 contains some more advanced examples.

Improving Startup Time in the NYTimes Android App (5.6s to 1.6s)
As device manufacturers continue to offer faster and more fluid experiences, users expect their native apps to be faster still. The NYTimes dev team recently rewrote their news app to take advantage of modern patterns such as dependency injection and reactive programming. This article details how they took their app startup time from 5.6 seconds on a Nexus 5 to 1.6 seconds.

Example of Realm with MVP and Dagger
Mateusz Budzar provides an example in which he attempts to use a Realm database in an app with MVP architecture and Dagger library.

Android vs iOS Mobile App Development [Infographic]
The creators of this infographic picked up 9 major differences between iOS and Android that  developers face when creating mobile applications. Among them, you will find the key ones, such as the difference in programming languages, the difference in integrated development environments, the difference in design, and the difference in distribution platforms.

How much can an SSD improve your Android development experience?
You don’t need to go out and spend over a thousand dollars to have a reasonably good experience while using Android Studio. Just upgrading an existing desktop or laptop with an SSD is an extremely viable alternative.

Understanding Architecture and widgets in Nick Butcher’s Plaid App
Self titled Android newbie, Smith, says he is just exploring various aspects of Android from application developers point of view. He has added some recent articles to his blog which look at understanding widgets in Plaid and understanding the architecture of Plaid.

Videos

Caster.io Episode 38: Gradle Plugin Basics
In this episode you will learn:

• Benefits of creating a Gradle Plugin
• How to create a custom Gradle task
• The basic structure of a Gradle Plugin
• How to create a Gradle Plugin in your build.gradle file

Consistent Android Testing Environments using Gradle by Drew Hannay
Bay Area Gradle Users Meetup @ Google and look at consistant Android testing environments using Gradle including what’s an emulator/AVD, custom Gradle plugins, dynamic dependencies and much more.

Open Source

AndroidNetworkTools
A collection of handy networking tools for everyday android development.

• Ping
• Port Scanning
• Subnet tools (find devices on local network)
• Wake-On-Lan & More

DilatingDotsProgressBar
A customizable indeterminate progress bar

Requery
Object-Relation Mapper and query for Java & Android

Paperparcel
PaperParcel is an annotation processor that automatically generates type-safe Parcelable wrappers for Kotlin and Java. PaperParcel is unique in that it supports Kotlin Data Classes.

PasswordEditText
A simple extension to the standard Android EditText which shows an icon on the right side of the field and lets the user toggle the visibility of the password they put in.