Issue #68

September 12th, 2013

Articles & Tutorials

Link Bild Extracting more useful data from Developer Console (plus.google.com)

Google dev Rich Hyndman shares a pro tip on extracting important information from Google Play console statistics.

 

Android is for startups (blog.audobox.com)
Will Whitney, founder of audobox, writes about how Android and the Play store help mobile startups.

NotificationListenerService and a Whatsapp extension for Dashclock (gmariotti.blogspot.de)
In this post Gabriele Mariotti talks how to use the new NotificationListenerService that was introduced with Android 4.3 (API 18). He'll show how an app can observe the stream of notifications with the user's permission.

10 Tips for More Efficient Apps (blog.azoft.com)
In this post Anna Orlova describes some high level techniques to be more efficient with resources like memory or battery life.

ActionBarCompat (blog.stylingandroid.com)
Mark Allison has released the second part of his ActionBarCompat tutorial. You can read Part 1 here if you missed it: http://blog.stylingandroid.com/archives/2020

Libraries & Code

AndroidSerialSQL - solving some problems with SQLite in Android (www.recursiverobot.com)
An Android project library that intends to solve the problem of concurrent write attempts from different threads to an Android SQLite database

Roundr (github.com)
Roundr takes advantage of the fact that regardless of the device's color, the screen is surrounded with a pitch black border, the corners of which are rarely ever touched. Roundr places four small overlays at the corners of the display, to simulate a rounded screen. All source code is available on GitHub.

AppRater (github.com)
AppRater is a library for Android designed to facilitate easy prompting of users to rate your app within the Google Play store. It won't prompt until at least 4 days and 7 uses of the app has passed and if the user chooses to rate later the count will start again.

Custom overscroll glow effects with EdgeEffectOverride (github.com)
EdgeEffectOverride is library designed to help override the blue overscroll_edge and overscroll_glow effects used by the the EdgeEffect class.

Simple ChangeLogs (github.com)
ChangeLog Library provides an easy way to display a change log in your Android app.

News

Link Bild Google is defragging Android (arstechnica.com)

Ron Amadeo writes an article for Ars Technica about the various efforts from Google to speed up getting releases and changes to the users.

 

Android KitKat (www.android.com)
Prepare for a sweet new treat. The upcoming version taking 4.4 build is suspected to run a new Linux kernel with low-memory optimisation. It was rumoured to be launched on October or November 2013 in celebration of Android's birthday.

Tools

Android Studio 0.2.8 Released (sites.google.com)
This new release of Android Studio has numerous updates to Lint, Gradle and more.

Videos

DevBytes: Cardflip Animation (www.youtube.com)
Daniel Olshansky gives an in-depth look at how to animate card flips and rotations. This video shows how the basic graphics and animation APIs can be used to rotate and flip views from different perspectives, as well as how to apply darkening shadow effects onto a View.

Link Bild Android Design in Action: Common UX Issues (www.youtube.com)

Join Nick Butcher, Adam Koch and Roman Nurik as they discuss various elements of Android Design. This week, we'll run through a top-ten-style list of the most common user experience issues we've observed during app review.

 

Functional Reactive Programming in the Netflix API (www.infoq.com)
Here's a great presentation introducing the reactive programming pattern for Java (RxJava), which is useable in Android programming.