Articles & Tutorials

You may have noticed a new support library called Palette which allows you to extract colors from images for use in your UI. Chris Banes share some insight into how to use it.

Google Play Services 5.0 which just launched contributes over twenty thousand methods to your app. 20k+. One third of the limit! Now that is scary.

The Palette class is an awesome tool to make improve UX with dynamic, content-based colors. The performance impact is small (at least on a relatively high-end device), and the benefits look great, especially with the new theme and animation possibilities in the L dev preview.

Google Play services 5.0 is now rolled out to devices worldwide, and it includes a number of features you can use to improve your apps. This release introduces Android wearable services APIs, Dynamic Security Provider and App Indexing, whilst also including updates to the Google Play game services, Cast, Drive, Wallet, Analytics, and Mobile Ads.

Blender is a new annotation processor that was introduced to speed up Guice performances at runtime. RoboGuice is the first library to benefit of it : 30-70% speed gain, 30% memory gain.

With each Android release, Google issues an API differences report, outlining things that were added, changed, or removed in a new API level compared to the previous one. Mark Murphy takes a look at some of the changes in the L preview.

Things are changing so rapidly in mobile hardware that we are starting to enter an era where no longer will there a difference in feature sets or capabilities between what your phone can do, and what a high end PC can do. The difference will simply be how much power the chips are allowed to consume.

ogle I/O this week brought a lot of exciting news about Android, and we probably need quite some time to get used to what Android L is bringing. Antonio Leiva has been playing with RecyclerView lately, and will give you a little presentation of what he discovered so far.

Dianne Hackborn posts on the new document-centric recents in Android.

Using touch to swipe between different views in an app has become one of the most popular navigation design patterns. In this blog, we will go through the steps necessary to create an app with lateral swipe navigation.

Arne Stockmans shows how easy it is to push keyboard input to an emulator via adb commands.

Retrofit from Square, and RxJava from Netflix, are a great combo for interacting with web services on Android.

Mark Allison was asked about how to create images with irregularly shaped outlines such as those in WhatsApp which are shaped like a speech bubble. In this series he’ll look at some techniques for doing precisely that.

Sponsored

In addition to serving as a competition for impassioned programmers, the ESA App Camp represents a chance to share ideas with like-minded people from all over Europe, to make interesting contacts at ESA, and to gain exciting insights into the Agency's work. Developers from all over Europe are invited to apply for entry by 21 July 2014.

This book will teach you how to turn your ideas into successful android apps by using agile. Pre-order your copy of Agile Android Software Development now and save 15% on the released book price!

Design

The real news from Google I/O wasn't about Android or Material Design itself. It was Google's implicit announcement that motion design is now a huge, required component for creating great software for mobile, desktop and wearable devices.

A quick look at some of the fundamental principles of material design, while avoiding restating the extremely detailed and thoughtfully crafted design guidelines. The real focus here is the purpose behind the design principles, not the principles themselves.

Jobs

We’re looking for Android Engineer's to help us build one of the best Android apps on the market. You should have experience delivering great apps and get excited by writing performant code for mobile devices. This is a full-time position based in San Francisco, CA.

Ustwo are looking for an Android developer with inspiring skills and passion to help deliver ground breaking products and services for both our clients and for our own IP. You have the opportunity to be yourself whilst being part of a talented, cross discipline team and can deliver real value.

Truecaller, one of the world’s fastest growing app companies, is looking for an awesome Android Developer having experience in building applications with solid technical stability and great user experience and who share our passion and values. Please visit our website to learn more!

Libraries & Code

Romain Guy shares the Material Witness sample application for the new Material Design APIs introduced in the Android L Preview SDK: Custom theme colors Dynamic palette Circular reveal Activity transitions

Android Animation Easing Functions. Let's make animation more real!

Gabriele Mariotti shares a little gist to build a simple Floating Action Button for Android-L with shadow, ripple and outline.

Events

So what is a better way to spend a hot summer day with an ice-cold drink, or a cold winter night with a piping hot drink, than to learn Rx by writing an awesome platform game? Register for the webinar coming on Friday, July 18th.