Articles & Tutorials

With the release of Google Play services 7.8, Google added new Mobile Vision APIs, which include a new Face API that finds human faces in images and video better and faster than before.

What do Effective Java items look like through the eyes of an Android developer? Fragmented podcast introduces the very first of these venerable “Items”: Consider providing static factory methods instead of constructors.

JSON is lightweight and great. But if you need even more performance you can use Flatbuffers. FlatBuffers is an evolution of protocol buffers that includes object metadata. In this post you'll learn the basics and how to use them in your app.

Iconify is a cool little library to manage icons in your Android app. This post gives a little introduction and the source code is available on GitHub.

Here's a short tip from Google on how to deal with changes in Android M's permissions.

Very few developers are lucky enough to be able to specify minSdkVersion="21" and use arcMotion Scene transitions. Mark Allison shows a really neat way to get very similar behavior back to API 11 (Honeycomb) which is almost as easy.

With the release of Google Play services 7.8 Google added new Mobile Vision APIs which provides the Barcode Scanner API to read and decode a myriad of different barcode types quickly, easily and locally.

Game Programming Patterns is a collection of patterns the author found in games that make code cleaner, easier to understand, and faster. Here's the free online version.

In this post you'll learn how to use the CoordinatorLayout to create behavior that will provide easy quick return functionality.

In this post you'll learn how to include a private library via gradle from Bitbucket.

In this post by Marco Uberti you'll learn how to mock an AsyncTask without external mocking libraries like Mockito or PowerMock.

Google recently announced the release of their cross-platform BLE Beacon format. In this post the guys from Ribot Labs took a look at it and show you how to use this new API to manage your beacons.

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Design

Google says this is Hangouts' update to material design, but what exactly does that mean for the app? There's more here than just a new FAB, so Liam Spradlin takes a closer look at some of the notable design changes in Hangouts 4.0.

Jobs

We are building PSPDFKit for Android using RxJava & C++ 14. It's a challenging project that is used in many apps and there's plenty of work to be done. We have a talented team, who enjoy the benefits of working in a remote environment. If you're up for a challenge, send us your resume.

Libraries & Code

Nice curated list of Android testing frameworks.

ReactiveNetwork is an Android library listening network connection state and change of the WiFi signal strength with RxJava Observables

Hugo Visser has published an update to android-apt, a gradle plugin that assists in working with annotation processors in combination with Android Studio.

UI form validation library for Android.

A Material Design themed ShowcaseView for Android.

Library that implements the floating action button to sheet transition from Google's Material Design documentation. It can be used with any FAB library on Android 4.0+ (API levels >= 14).

Android fillable progress view working with SVG paths. This is a nice option too if you want to create an interesting branding logo for your app.

A sample application created to test, explore and demonstrate the Proximity Beacon API.

Tools

LayoutCast is a Android Studio plugin to cast every change in your Java source code or resources (including library projects) to your phone or emulator within 5 sec, without restarting your application. (Currently Mac only)

Videos

Dan Lew chats with Chiu-Ki about themes and styles while surrounded by Android plushies!