This Weeks Links

Fragmented Podcast Episode 038: What you Need to know about N
In this episode, Donn and Kaushik look at the Android N developer preview. They highlight the biggest changes that you as an Android Developer should keep an eye out for. There are tonne of features in N, so listen to this episode to get the highlights.

Make fast cryptographic operations on Android with Conceal
Conceal, a set of Java APIs which perform fast cryptographic operations on Android, have been designed to be able to encrypt large files on disk in a fast and memory efficient manner. This post takes you through installation and encryption/decryption with Conceal.

Hardening the media stack
To help make Android more secure, the Android security team encourages and rewards researchers who discover vulnerabilities. This post looks at Prevention measures taken to stop bugs from becoming vulnerabilities, and how the team protects the system by de-privileging and isolating components that handle untrusted content using Containment measures.

Keyboard handling on Android
While implementing free-text annotation editing into the PSPDFKit for Android framework, Tomáš Šurín and team felt that working with a soft keyboard on Android can be confusing. Here’s some of the lessons they learned along the way.

Android Grid Layout
GridLayout can be a powerful tool in the right hands. It provides great flexibility and performance. In this post,  Dmytro Danylyk, looks at why we need Grid Layout and why he feels this layout has been unfairly forgotten.

Looking at JRebel for Android and Instant Run: how to update code and resources in Android application without wasting time on restarts.
Since Android Studio 2.0 has finally been released, this is a good time to compare JRebel for Android and Google’s own Instant Run. Whether you decide to pick Google’s Instant Run or JRebel for Android is entirely up to you, but this guide may be what you need to help you decide what suits your needs.

Getting started with JRebel for Android
As the functionality of your project grows you’ll find that your build times follow suit. There are plenty of suggestions of how to squeeze the most out of your Gradle builds. One thing you can try is JRebel for Android. It takes a different approach by not introducing a new apk after each change. Instead apk gets installed once and delta packages are shipped over to the device or emulator and are applied during runtime. Here is how to get started..

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Something O’Clock – Part 5
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-5 looks at considerations of storing the current configuration within the wear app.

Android – Get more out of Butter Knife
Paresh Mayani says that during his involvement with many projects he has observed most android developers are using Butter Knife library for binding views by using @Bind or defining click listeners by @OnClick annotations. In this article Paresh looks at other features and functionalities which Butter Knife provides, which can reduce boilerplate code as much as possible in Android.

TheContext-Podcast: Episode 4: Indie Development
This episode covers:

• How to get started in Indie development
• Project management as single developer
• Testing and Continuous Integration
• How does an Indie developer decides which libraries or technologies to use?
• Designing without being a designer
• Play Store, in app purchases and subscriptions

10 Android apps developers will love (Slideshow)

These Android apps deliver powerful programming and system features to smartphones and tablets. From full-blown IDEs to essential resource utilities, this slideshow covers the top 10 apps for Android developers.

Easy publishing to the Central Repository
A short video series of 8 videos that will help you with publishing your artifacts to the Central Repository. This series will pick up on the common misconception and problems and covers everything from claiming your namespace in the Central Repository to first deployments and getting help.

The best Android app development learning resources
A compilation of a few Android app development learning resources provided by Bugfender. These include books, videos, YouTube channels, online courses, mobile apps and websites.

Blended Android tidbits
A few useful tips from Daniele Altomare covering permissions, files directory symbolic link and shrinking debug builds.

Tailoring Pants for Square
Developers at Square have been using and contributing to Pants project since 2014. Today the tool has a streamlined installation process, extensive documentation, a clean extensible design, a vibrant community and a history of stable weekly releases. Here is why Square believes that Pants is ready for more widespread adoption and encourages you to give it a try.

Marshmallow puffs up as Lollipop freezes
The May 2016 Android platform stats release by Google show that Marshmallow has almost doubled its growth again. With Marshmallow now holding 7.5% of the platform share, Lollipop’s growth has begun to stagnate.

Videos

Caster.IO Episode 63 – Retrofit 2: Exploring Get Requests – @Query and @Path Parameters
In this episode you will learn:

• Send a GET request with query parameters using the @Query annotation
• Send a GET request with path element using the @Path annotation
• Enqueue a GET request for asynchronous communication using @Query and @Path

Droidcon SF 2016
A YouTube video list compilation of the DroidCon San Francisco 2016 talks.

Open Source

Anvil
Anvil is a small Java library for creating reactive user interfaces. Originally inspired by React, it suits well as a view layer for MVVM or Redux design patterns.

AndroidDemoIn4Languages
A simple Android application written in Java, Groovy, Scala and Kotlin with an of finding out what is the better language for Android development.

Android DebugPort
Android DebugPort allows you to write and execute code within your app’s context, at runtime, from the comfort of your desktop computer’s terminal. Think of it as a window into your application through which you can both inspect and modify its state.