Articles & Tutorials

Material design is a comprehensive approach to visual, interaction and motion design for the multi-screen world. Android 5.0 Lollipop and the updated support libraries help you to create material UIs. Here’s a rundown of some of the major elements of material design and the APIs and widgets that you can use to implement them in your app.

As a tester, repeated routines includes downloading a new build from our CI server, uninstalling the build from my test devices (note the plural), launching the app for a specific set of tests or investigations. Russell Collins shares a script that can help automate some of this process.

Jake Wharton shares how the Picasso image loading library can be cleanly paired with the new Palette class in the support library.

Mark Allison is starting a new series of articles, this time about applying Material Design to an application.

This learning path is a collection of online resources that cover tools and principles for designing and building Android apps. It also covers advanced topics like material design, using sensors, maps and location services, wearables and app distribution on the play store.

Mike Burton announced the release of RoboGuice 3, the popular dependency injection framework for Android on http://roboguice.org.  The team has added some new features to RoboGuice 3, but development of this latest version was focused on performance.

How many lines of code will it take to let your users say Ok Google, and search for something in your app? As it turns out, hardly any.

Google shares a material design checklist that you can use to mark progress as you implement the new design system. The checklist is divided into 4 key sections based on the 4 key aspects of material design.

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Design

Here's a deep dive into how Google has been delivering the side navigation pattern in the latest Google apps in preparation for the release of Android L.

Jobs

Work on special projects with great companies through Toptal. Set your weekly/hourly rate, and work from anywhere in the world as an elite Android developer. See if you have what it takes!

We are Expensify and we do "expense reports that don't suck"! We are looking for an incredibly hard worker, a cool person to be with, someone who is super talented in a general way and specifically talented in a programming way.

Foursquare is looking for experienced Android engineers to help architect, build and manage both of our mobile applications, Foursquare and Swarm. You'll be part of a fast-paced team driving ongoing product iteration and working in the competitive space of consumer-facing location-based services.

We are looking for experienced Android engineers to join our team in Zurich, as part of Numbrs. Come and help us to revolutionise the banking industry. Zurich is at the technological forefront, much like our cutting edge banking app Numbrs.

Android App Makers wanted! Come join a team building the next-generation of financial apps for Capital One. If Jelly Bean and KitKat make you think of ViewPagers and Fragments instead of tasty treats, then you need to come check us out! We're looking for developers with 2+ years Android experience.

Libraries & Code

The Transround SDK implements dynamic language resource handling with AOP for Android apps. It is used for on-device app translation and on the fly resource distribution in a free app localization framework and service.

News

Copresence, which we saw a glimpse of in a recent teardown, appears to be aimed at letting nearby Android and iOS devices communicate with one another in a variety of ways, exchanging files, photos, directions, messages, or other content, essentially making Copresence a sort of contactless, cross-platform version of Android Beam.

Googlers talk future-proofing, Nexus devices, and the always-on voice commands.

Tools

Android Lollipop has VectorDrawables, and this tool can convert a simple SVG with only path elements.

Tor Norbye shares that the new version of the Android Gradle plugin, released today, can automatically remove unused resources.

Android Studio 0.9.0 released to the canary channel! This release adds support for the new version of the Android Gradle plugin, 0.14.0. In addition, there are a number of bug fixes, particularly in the AVD manager (which now also provides builtin emulator skins for the Nexus devices.)

Specials

VisionMobile has just launched their latest Developer Economics survey and is tracking developer trends across platforms, app revenues and dev tools - as well as investigating the emerging IoT market. The key findings from the survey will become available in the form of a free research report in February.