Articles & Tutorials

This post shows how easy it is to create a simple shadow for your views using custom shapes.

Here the first in a series of articles for getting set up to build AOSP on a Mac.

If you want to simulate slow and spotty network connections on a device, one way to do it is by configuring OpenWRT on a router.

Blurring images is an effect a lot of developers need to achieve, and it may require some time and efforts to be implemented. Also, since a lot of image manipulation is required, if it's not appropriately coded it can be really a pain in terms of CPU and memory usage.

Taylor Ling takes a look at the right time to use the Navigation Drawer in your app.

In this series Mark Allison takes a look at various techniques that we can employ to make our app feel much nicer, and provide a richer and, hopefully, more engaging experience for the user.

Cyril Mottier published a "behind the scene" blog post to described how and why he used transition animations to enhance the search experience in the Capitaine Train Android app.

This slide deck gives a nice overview of where to find Android resources that can help speed up development of your app.

Jobs

A versed engineer with good taste and incredible product sense, ready to build great features with minimal direction.

Weebly runs over 2% of all websites on the Internet. Help lead the development of an Android application that our users are eager for. Work in a creative environment where you'll be able to work on a variety of projects & platforms with awesome peers. Email deva@weebly.com.

Phunware is the 4th fastest growing software company in the U.S. per the latest Inc. 500 and we are very proud to have been named to the Forbes’ 2014 list of America’s Most Promising Companies. Create experiences for top customer brands in all categories from Sports to Entertainment.

Do more than code. Raizlabs is seeking an experienced senior Android mobile developer to engineer beautiful apps and influence product direction for startups and big brands, alike. You’ll be working with enthusiastic and supportive peers in a trust-based work environment. Check out www.raizlabs.com

Libraries & Code

Mizuu is a user friendly media center application for Android tablets and smartphones. The application helps manage all your movie and TV show video files - and automatically fetches useful information about the video content, including title, plot, cover art and actors.

Swipeable-cards is a native library for Android that provide a Tinder card like effect. A card can be constructed using an image and displayed with animation effects, dismiss-to-like and dismiss-to-unlike, and use different sorting mechanisms.

Tools

Live templates are predefined code fragments, which allow us to code faster and finally to become more productive.

Gabriele Mariotti has a new plugin to simplify integration with Travis CI.

This is a faster fork of ProGuard, based off of ProGuard 4.11. Our tests show this fork to be 2.5x faster than upstream ProGuard and produces bit-for-bit identical output.

ContentProviders can be a hassle to maintain. For every Uri you create you have to add it to 5 different methods, as well as add it to your UriMatcher. To alleviate this, Schematic generates the ContentProvider for you. All you have to do is define the Uri's and annotate them.

Videos

Messaging is a powerful addition to your Android app, but implementation can be tricky. Juan Gomez gives an overview on how to do so using the protocols available on the Android platform.

Another release of Google Play services is out - version 4.4.This release includes a blockbuster announcement: Street View for Google Maps Android API. There's also a whole lot more!

App of the Week

The App Dialer provides a revolutionary way to app search! Only a few clicks on a simple T9 keyboard are required to launch any app. This saves time when you need to find and launch apps quickly.

Specials

In the past weeks we had some problems with the GMail spam filter. It would be very helpful if you could take a look at your email spam folders and mark our issues as "not spam". You can also keep our issues from landing in the spam folder by adding our email address to your address book. Thank you very much for your support!