Articles & Tutorials

There was a lot of discussion in the Pixite team about how to encourage people to rate the app without being annoying. Here are some of the things they considered and learned.

Mike Gouline makes the case for using Kotlin to write your Android apps.

Glide is an open source media management framework for Android that wraps media decoding, memory and disk caching, and resource pooling into a simple and easy to use interface. It is specifically designed not only to be easy to use, but also to make scrolling lists of images as smooth and pleasant to use as possible

In this series of posts, we will be focused on the low-level details involved in building your own LayoutManager implementation, to do something a bit more complex than a simple vertical or horizontal scrolling list.

Previously in this series we’ve looked at the software design decisions and the main timer engine for our Android Wear app to time do football (soccer to our American cousins) matches. In this article Mark Allison looks at how we can wake up periodically in order to update the user.

Fernando Cejas decided that was a good time to write an article about architecting android applications. The purpose of it is to show you a little approach he had in mind in the last few months plus all the stuff I have learned from investigating and implementing it.

FFMPEG is a beast when it comes to compiling it manually. This article explains how you do it for Android including the x264 codec.

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Design

Google refreshed the Beautiful Design collection with their latest favorite specimens of delightful design from Google Play. As a reminder, the goal of this collection is to highlight beautiful apps with masterfully crafted design details such as beautiful presentation of photos, crisp and meaningful layout and typography, and delightful yet intuitive gestures and transitions.

Animations can be both one of the most powerful tools in your UI design and the most destructive. A well designed animation can be both helpful and delightful. A bad animation is annoying and counter productive. Juhani Lehtimäki takes a look at a couple of examples of how to approach this in your apps.

Jobs

Great to design/build brand new consumer experience on Android apps. Current apps see 50K+ downloads/day! 30 million unique users/month! * help design & build applications * participate in R&D of highly scalable consumer facing mobile apps * 100% hands on coding Connect with us to learn more.

Karma's vision is to make getting online seamless and headache-free by putting WiFi in the palm of your hand. We're looking for our first full-time Android engineer who will have the opportunity to own new features from day one, and build an Android experience that is second to none.

We've created a cross-platform mobile framework, YAPL, that uses native controls. The Android implementation isn't quite up to our standards and we'd love your expertise to help it get there! With over 2M users, we're looking for an Android developer to help us scale!

Libraries & Code

Most modern apps feature an "Used Library"-Section and for this some information of those libs is required. As it gets annoying to copy those strings always to your app I've developed this small helper library to provide the required information.

Holdr generates classes based on your layouts to help you interact with them in a type-safe way. It removes the boilerplate of doing TextView myTextView = findViewById(R.id.my_text_view) all the time.

This repo provides simple animators for the item views in the RecyclerView This code is cloned from DefaultItemAnimator provided by Google customizing the animations.

News

Coming throughout the rest of this year, the Android Wear team is making some updates to Wear that will help you get even more out of your watch—and the rest of your life, too. 

Videos

Data serialization is vital to all modern games, but choosing the wrong format can cause bloated files that take longer to load. Flatbuffers are a data serialization library that focuses on creating the smallest serialized files with the fastest load time possible.

This Devoxx presentation by Jake Wharton will starts with a basic overview of dependency injection including why you would use it and how Dagger differs from other injectors. Following that he looks at what is necessary to use Dagger in the scope of an Android app. He wraps up with some advanced concepts as well as general tips and tricks for achieving maximum utility.