Issue #158

June 21st, 2015

Articles & Tutorials

 
link image   When Iron Man becomes reactive, RxJava (saulmm.github.io)

This article focuses on using RxJava and how the operators can minimize the time in common development tasks. RxJava offers a wide range of operators to make your life easier.

 
Design Library – Part 2 (blog.stylingandroid.com)

Previously Mark Allison looked at getting a basic navigation drawer working via the Material design support library. In this post he looks at how to implement a tab bar.

 
Exploring the new Android Design Support Library (medium.com)

This new library introduces several new components previously not available out-of-the-box. Here we take a brief look at what they are, what they do and how we can implement them.

 
link image   More Material Design with Topeka for Android (android-developers.blogspot.co.uk)

Google has published a new material design example: The Android version of Topeka. It demonstrates that the same branding and material design principles can be used to create a consistent experience across platforms.

 
How We Developed the Guillotine Menu Animation for Android (yalantis.com)

Android developer Dmytro Denysenko took up the challenge to implement a stylish navigation menu on the Android platform. He couldn’t even predict what difficulties he'd have to face and how deep he'd have to dive in search of the solution.

 
Android Studio Live Templates (www.bignerdranch.com)

Code completion can improve your productivity by reducing how much you have to type, but there are situations when a more powerful tool is needed. Thanks to Android Studio and IntelliJ, live templates make it much easier to focus on just the things you care about.

 
Things You May Not Know: Tools Attributes (www.randomlytyping.com)

This article introduces the Tools Attributes which add metadata to resource files, facilitate manipulating, rendering, and testing layouts in Design view.

 
Introduction to RxJava for Android (Pt. 2) (www.philosophicalhacker.com)

In this second post of the series, the author fills in the missing gaps in our understanding of his initial statement of what RxJava allows us to do.

 
Diving Into Android 'M' Doze (newcircle.com)

One of the headlining features of the upcoming Android 'M' release is something Google has termed "doze" - a mechanism by which applications are forced into limited activity when the device has been sitting dormant and inactive for a significant amount of time. Dave Smith uncovers a bit about how this new feature works at the system level.

 
Why you should avoid using an event bus (endlesswhileloop.com)

Event busses are often sold as allowing you to loosely couple together components, but in reality they give you the confusion of loose coupling and the downsides that come with tight coupling.

 
How to improve quality and syntax of your Android code (vincentbrison.com)

In this article, the author presents different ways of improving your Android code with automatic tools such as Checkstyle, Findbugs,  PMD, and of course Android Lint.

 
Level-up with Android Studio Shortcuts and Live Templates (stablekernel.com)

An article about how to harness the power of Android Studio’s keyboard shortcuts, refactoring options and live templates to allow you to navigate and refactor the code as fast as you can think about it.

 

Sponsored

 
link image   Hired: The Marketplace for Android Dev Jobs (hired.com)

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Jobs

 
Android Engineer @ Slack (San Francisco, CA)

Slack is looking for people who are passionate about creating great Android applications. Are you as comfortable composing efficient layouts that work well across various screen sizes and densities as you are debugging performance issues in the persistence layer? Then we need you!

 

Libraries & Code

 
link image   AppIntro (github.com)

Android Library to make a cool intro for your app.

 
VitaminSaber (github.com)

Vitamin Saber provides resource injection for Android (@InjectResource(resId)). It is annotation processor based and will provide all the speed you need on Android by avoiding reflection.

 
IntentBuilder (github.com)

IntentBuilder is a type safe way of creating intents and populating them with extras. Intents were created to be very dynamic but often times the dynamic nature of intents is not needed and just gets in the way of writing safe code.

 
GuillotineMenu-Android (github.com)

Neat library, that provides a simple way to implement guillotine-styled animation

 
Heimdall (github.com)

Heimdall is an easy to use OAuth 2 library for Android. Connecting various SocialNetworks like Github or Facebook can be a daunting task - Heimdall helps you to provide an easy to use interface to achieve that task. Be sure to checkout the example app in to Repo.

 

Videos

 
link image   Hidden Cost of Transparency (www.youtube.com)

In this video, Ian Ni Lewis discusses the secret performance costs of using transparency on Android, and all the tips & tricks needed to help you find, and fix them.