Articles & Tutorials

The new runtime: ART (plus.google.com)
Matthias Schaff shares part one of a small series of articles about the newest Android 4.4 Kitkat. The series is supposed to give you a deeper into the internals and changes of Kitkat from a developer/system developer perspective and it starts with the new runtime: ART

RxJava and Android: error handling (howrobotswork.wordpress.com)
If you’re working with async processes, transparent error handling is a must for adequate user experience. This example is about calling a REST service, where error handling is particularly important: as networking is sensitive, it always requires some sort of retry, timeout and failure mechanism. RxJava is built for creating fault-tolerant apps, this tutorial will show you the basics.

Smart Watch App Development (www.kpbird.com)
A light introduction by Ketan Parmar to the various Android-based smartwatch SDKs available.

Smart Watch – Part 1 (blog.stylingandroid.com)
Mark Allison starts a new series, this time looking at developing for the I'm watch Android smart watch.

Changes to the SecretKeyFactory API in Android 4.4 (android-developers.blogspot.com)
Beginning with Android 4.4 KitKat, Google has made a subtle change to the behavior of SecretKeyFactory. This change may break some applications that use symmetric encryption and meet all of the some conditions.

New Tools to Take Your Games to the Next Level (android-developers.blogspot.com)
Google released more tools to your game developer toolbox, including a new open source 2D physics library, as well as new features in Google Play game services offering, like a plug-in for Unity.

Sponsored

Wearables DevCon, March 5-7, San Francisco (www.wearablesdevcon.com)
Wearables DevCon is a groundbreaking event for designers, builders and developers of wearable computing devices and software. Leading research analysts project 400 million devices to be sold annually by 2017.

Jobs

Senior Android Mobile Engineer @ Eventbrite (hire.jobvite.com)
We're hiring a mobile engineer to build innovative Android apps. We're building the platform & tools that are changing a massive industry & looking for talented people to join our team. Have solid experience with client-side Java & the Android SDK? Let's talk. Location: San Francisco, CA.

Android Developer @ Jimdo (www.jimdo.com)
Do you love the Android platform so much that your skin is turning green? Help us building the ultimate Android experience for our users. Location: Hamburg, Germany.

Senior Game Developer @ Social Point (hire.jobvite.com)
As a Senior Game Developer you will build our amazing games and contribute to improve them daily. You need strong background in C++, solid understanding of 2D/3D graphics and math involved in computer graphics and previous game development experience. Location: Barcelona.

Libraries & Code

PhoneHome (github.com)
PhoneHome is a standalone library that sends logs from remote Android devices to a central server for debugging.

ColorArt (github.com)
ColorArt is a library that uses an image to create a themed image/text display by extracting common and matching colors from a bitmap.

CustomShapeImageView (github.com)
Custom shape ImageView using PorterDuffXfermode with paint shapes and SVGs

Tools

Play images sanitizer (android-screenshots.appspot.com)
The Play images sanitizer cleans up or removes the status bar and software keys bar from your app's snapshots, so that they look good when previewed in the Play store

Videos

DutchAUG - Better Builds (www.youtube.com)
Presentation by Christopher Orr on build automation for Android using Jenkins CI at the Dutch Android User Group meetup on 27th of June. This talks gives an overview of the Jenkins continuous integration engine and how the Android Emulator plugin that Chris wrotes enables you to build your Android projects using Jenkins.

Migrating Your Apps to the New Gradle Build Process (thenewcircle.com)
Geoff Matrangola delivers a session at AnDevCon to describe the differences between the old and new tool set, and how to best leverage the new capabilities and architecture of Gradle.