This Weeks Links

Fragmented Podcast Episode 035: All about Vector support on Android
In this mini Fragment we touch base on all the things you need to know about Vector drawables for Android development. How one can use it today, the recommended usage for vector drawable and formats, the limitations and everything else you need to know as an Android developer.

Android N Developer Preview 2 is out
This latest preview of Android N fixes a few bugs including not being able to connect to hidden Wi-Fi networks (AOSP 203116), Multiwindow pauses (AOSP 203424), and Direct Reply closing an open activity (AOSP 204411). Take a look at what’s new!

Effortless network response logging on Android
While developing an app that gets data from a remote server, you often need to see what data you’re actually receiving. This article looks at what options you have to inspect network responses when using Retrofit and OkHttp.

Optimize, Develop, and Debug with Vulkan Developer Tools
Vulkan is a new 3D rendering API, geared to provide explicit low-overhead GPU control to developers. Vulkan’s reduction of CPU overhead allows some synthetic benchmarks to see as much as 10 times the draw call throughput on a single core as compared to OpenGL ES. There are many similarities between OpenGL ES and Vulkan, but Vulkan offers new features for developers who need to make every millisecond count, so take a look at the details and the video!

Unit tests with custom JUnit rules, annotations and resources
Unit testing is a process in which the smallest testable parts of an application (units), are independently checked for proper operation. There are several techniques which can be used to improve quality and readability of test code. This article covers annotations, JUnit rules and java resources.

Setting custom font through XML with DataBinding
With the help of DataBinding you will be able to set a custom font with just one line, without creating any object of TextView/EditText. sounds interesting? Just follow the step by step instruction provided in the article.

Something O’Clock – Part 2
Mark Allison talks about his recently released watch face app for Android Wear. Mark says although the app itself is quite light-hearted, the code behind it is worthy of study as the final app will consist of three separate modules. Part-2 looks at the layout and drawing of the watch face.

Growing Eddystone with Ephemeral Identifiers: A Privacy Aware & Secure Open Beacon Format
Eddystone is an open and extensible Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) beacon format from Google. With the new introduction of Ephemeral ID’s developers now have more power to control who can make use of the beacon signal. Here are the details and technical specifications.

A beginners guide to an effective Android testing strategy
Testing quite often is one of the most neglected aspect in many Software projects, and in Android this is a particularly common issue. Time and discipline is required to implement and maintain a good range of tests. This blog post takes a look at the types of test, architecting the app for testing, the ‘Test Pyramid’, implementation and the running of the tests.

Android Support Library 23.3 available now
This release of the Android Support Library fixes a number of bugs in Support v4, AppCompat, RecyclerView, MediaRouter, Design, and Preferences. There are some additional notes AppCompat users and those using Support v4 Fragments should be aware of.

AppLaunchChecker – a first quick analysis
With the release of the Android Support Library revision 23.3.0, a new utility class has been introduced to help track how your app has been launched by the user in the past. Here is some key points from the documentation.

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Introduction to Shared Preferences in Android
Android provides many ways of storing data in an application. One of the way to store data is through Preferences. Preferences allow us to save and retrieve data. This post aims to show you how to use Preferences to store data in any Android application.

Introduction to Menus in Android
Menus are slightly different from other UI components. Menus are a hierarchy of the options. Depending on what you’ve built, these options and features could affect the way that the app behaves. This post gives you the information about the different Menu types and how to create menus in different Android versions

Droidcon Italy recap
With over 770 attendees and four different tracks at Droidcon Italy, it would be impossible for Jeroen Mols to attend every session, but he would like to share the hot topics and his personal highlights with you.

Google is thinking to add Swift support on Android ? Don’t forget Kotlin!
Currently, Google’s Android operating system supports Java as its first class language.
Some sources are reporting that Google is considering making Swift a first class language for Android because of litigation with Oracle. This article looks at why Kotlin could be the best solution for Google.

pair, a git author tool
This simple tool is used frequently at Square, to quickly expand names and create a joint email alias for all the authors of a commit and Brian Donovan hopes it will useful for you too!

How to install Android in Oracle Virtual Machine (VM)?
This blog post will guide you through the steps needed to install Oracle Virtual Machine for Android. The post will advise you what options to choose and provides screenshots along the way.

Introducing Spark
Spark is an Android library for drawing sparklines. Sparklines are a great way to succinctly communicate the relative change of a particular value where screen space is limited.

Spark was built as a lightweight alternative to the other Android charting libraries. Spark’s initial release weighs in at only 15KB and 91 methods. This is over 95% smaller than other Android charting libraries.

Videos

Caster.IO Episode 58: Java 8 Static Methods with Android N
In this quick lesson you will learn:

• What are Java 8 static methods
• What are the benefits of using Java 8 static methods
• How to use Java 8 static methods in your application

Caster.IO Episode 59: Testing Activity Views with Robolectric – Part 1
In this episode you will learn:

• How TDD works on Android.
• How to test TextView and its attributes.
• How to create a helper for resource fetching.
• How to create a helper for view assertions.

Open Source

Android-Orma
Orma is an ORM (Object-Relation Mapper) for Android SQLiteDatabase, generating helper classes at compile time with annotation processing, inspired in ActiveAndroid, GreenDAO, and Realm.

Orma has the following features:

• Fast as hand-written code with SQLiteOpenHelper
• Annotation-based schema definitions with POJO classes
• Semi-automatic migration, as well as hand-written migration

SwipeOpenItemTouchHelper
Library to easily add swipe-to-open functionality to any RecyclerView