This Weeks Links

Fragmented Podcast Episode 039: Talking TextView with Elliott Chenger
In this episode we chat with our friend an all round amazing AndroidDev Elliott Chenger. Elliot does Android development for Under Armour and knows a thing or two about TextViews. We talk TextViews, font rendering complications in Android, performance optimizations, localization (vs internationalization), ECDC (it’s a thing!) and wind the discussion off with some design software tools out there.

The absolute minimum Android developers need to know about UX — Part 1 of 5

As a developer your responsibility is as much towards a clean UX design as it is towards a clean architecture. This series of articles aims to help you reduce the number of design rules and libraries needed for your UX design and increase the likelihood of users jumping on your app. Part 1 introduces the concept of Visibility as a UX principle of design.

The absolute minimum Android developers need to know about UX — Part 2 of 5
As a developer your responsibility is as much towards a clean UX design as it is towards a clean architecture. This series of articles aims to help you reduce the number of design rules and libraries needed for your UX design and increase the likelihood of users jumping on your app. Part 2 introduces the concept of Affordance and looks at implementing Affordance effectively.

Unit Testing RxJava: From Beginner to Competent User
This article aims to show you the most reasonable ways of unit testing RxJava-related code. The article is aimed primarily at developers who already have a basic working knowledge of developing applications with the help of RxJava and unit testing in general.

Testing Rx code
Maciej Bożętka reveals a solution for an issue encountered with call chains when async calls are handled by RxJava, especially they are passed between different threads by observeOn() and subscribeOn() operators, where testing can be problematic. Take a look at the solution which provides some powerful methods to test observables behaviors.

Efficiently reducing your method count
This article will show you how you can visualize your current method count and understand what libraries are eating up the largest part of that before reducing it and removing that nasty multidex solution once and for all.

This one simple change for better class naming will blow your mind
Naming plays an important role in your codebase and getting it right is hard. This blog post will discuss class naming using Model View Presenter as the example and show you one change you can do to make your code cleaner and more readable.

Choosing the right Background Scheduler in Android
Google has introduced several new classes to Android for scheduling work that needs to run outside the scope of an application’s lifecycle. This post takes a look at the different methods for scheduling tasks in Android and discuss the pros and cons of each so that you can determine when to use each tool.

Designing for Multi-Window
Building a responsive UI that reacts to the space available is critical to a great multi-window experience, but it is an exercise that can benefit all of your users across the wide variety of Android devices. This post looks at creating an even more responsive UI, adapting your layout, design configurations and patterns to avoid when designing for Multi-Window.

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Android How to Build Intro Slider for your App
In this article you will learn how to add an intro slider to your app where a user can swipe through some slides before getting into app. The article includes a simple app that contains few intro slides with next and skip navigation and shows you how to make the intro screen appear the first time the app is launched.

Something O’Clock – Part 6
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-6, the concluding article, takes a look at updating the watch-face UI in response to configuration changes.

Discover OkHttp, a powerful HTTP & HTTP/2 client for Android applications
Square’s OkHttp is a lightweight, open source, HTTP and HTTP/2 client which lets you to make fast requests and save bandwidth – while offering some great features out of the box. If you are still unfamiliar with OkHttp, this article will introduce you to this elegant and powerful library and help you get started!

Android Working with Retrofit HTTP Library
Using Square’s Retrofit HTTP Library, a type-­safe REST client for Android, you can make all network stuff much more easier. As an example, this article will take some json and display it in RecyclerView as a list.

Lego Device Lab
You may have heard of a ‘Device Lab’, which helps to solve the problem of organizing all those devices you need to test your app with. You may have also seen the price tag on some of these commercial solutions.. Without further ado, introduced to the Lego device lab!

Yelp Android App Went On A Diet
Coltin Caverhill, Yelp Software Engineer, gives some inside tips on how they reduced their compressed APK size from 27.1MB to 23.1MB. Going into detail of their experience with lossless image compression vs lossy compression, this is definitely worth a look!

Building Modular and Reactive Android Applications (Slideshow)
This slideshow from Mouna Cheikhna looks at Dagger 2 and MVP when building modular and reactive apps for Android and provides some helpful hints along the way.

Introducing the second class of Launchpad Accelerator
Launchpad Accelerator, a program that exclusively works with late-stage tech startups in emerging markets, is about to launch it second class. Class 2 kicks off June 13. The startups will descend on Google HQ for an intensive 2 week bootcamp, under the tutelage of Google product teams and mentors from the global Launchpad network. Here is a list of the startups and the details.

Videos

Caster.IO Episode 64: Retrofit 2 – Configuring a HTTP Logging Interceptor

In this episode you will learn:

• How and why its useful to have HTTP Logging within Retrofit
• How to build a custom OkHttpClient
• How to add an interceptor to your custom OkHttpClient
• How to configure different logging levels for different build configurations
• What the different logging levels provide

Caster.IO Episode 65: Retrofit 2 – POST Requests with @Body and @Field Params
In this episode you will learn:

• When you should use a POST request
• How to send a POST request with @Body
• How to send a POST request with @Field parameters

Open Source

Kinject
A fast dependency injector for Android and Java.

AndroidAnnotations
AndroidAnnotations is an Open Source framework that speeds up Android development. By simplifying your code, it facilitates its maintenance.