Issue #160

July 5th, 2015

Articles & Tutorials

 
link image   Use colorPrimary to colorize your App Bar (plus.google.com)

AppCompat makes bringing your UI consistency very straightforward using a technique of providing a color palette for your app. While introduced in the Material themes added in Android 5.0, AppCompat makes this technique available to all Android 2.1+ devices.

 
Yet Another Deep Dive of Android Binder Framework, Part 1 (pierrchen.blogspot.com)

In this series of articles, the author takes a close look at the major classes that form the Android Binder Framework. These user space classes are the foundation for implementing Java service and are the backbones of system native services.

 
link image   New Permissions in Android Mobile (www.phunware.com)

At the time of download, before you can even open the app, you get asked to accept a list of permissions. This list can be daunting and long. Thankfully, permissions policies are changing in Android M.

 
Easy Declaration and Routing of Your Deep Links (nerds.airbnb.com)

DeepLinkDispatch is designed to help developers handle deep links easily without having to write a lot of boilerplate code and allows you to supply more complicated parsing logic for deciding what to do with a deep link

 
Welcome Snackbar, Goodbye Toast- Part 2 (www.technotalkative.com)

In this second part, Paresh Mayani introduces Snackbar, another component available in design support library. Using Snackbar, we can show a quick message at the bottom (mostly) of the screen

 
Coloring Android Apps with Palette (code.tutsplus.com)

In Paul Trebilcox-Ruiz's article, you will learn how to create a Palette object from a bitmap. Contained within each Palette is a set of Swatch objects that will allow you to work with specific color profiles and a list of visible colors from the image.

 
Pro-Tip: Android Test + Espresso + JaCoCo (plus.google.com)

If you try to run Espresso tests on a device and at the same time as grabbing code coverage information, you may run into some issues. This tip has a workaround.

 
Debugging Android native shared libraries (blog.dornea.nu)

This article introduces all you need to write C/C++ code for Android via the NDK, and how to debug it.

 
Dependency injection with Dagger 2 - Custom scopes (frogermcs.github.io)

This article in a series introduces custom scopes and how to implement in Dagger 2 - functionality which can be a bit problematic for Dependency Injection beginners.

 
Unit Testing RxJava Observables (medium.com)

The first step to rx-ify your architecture is to change the methods in the data layer so that they returned Observables. The next question is: how do you unit test this?

 

Design

 
link image   Designing For (and With) Color Blindness (medium.com)

If 1 out of every 10 users finds your app to be difficult or even impossible to use, your ratings and reviews will drop drastically. So, how do we test for this? How do we fix any issues? And how can we prevent issues from popping up to begin with?

 

Jobs

 
Android Engineer @ Slack (San Francisco, CA)

Slack is looking for people who are passionate about creating great Android applications. Are you as comfortable composing efficient layouts that work well across various screen sizes and densities as you are debugging performance issues in the persistence layer? Then we need you!

 
Android developer @ The Guardian (London)

Guardian News & Media Ltd are looking for experienced Android Developers who really understand what developing for mobile means. This role represents an exciting opportunity to work for one of the most successful and innovative media organisations in the world.

 
Android Software Craftsmen (London )

Novoda is a Vibrant App Development Company based in London, Liverpool, Berlin and NYC .If you are passionate about the future of Android interconnected devices we would love to hear from you.

 
Android Engineer (Oakland, CA)

VSCO, the standard of mobile photography, is building world-class Android apps that equip and inspire anyone anywhere with the tools to create, discover, and connect. Devoted to extraordinary UX/UI? Dream of optimizing performance on mobile? Believe there is no higher order than clean code? Join us!

 

Libraries & Code

 
Deeplinkdispatch (github.com)

DeepLinkDispatch provides a declarative, annotation-based API to declare application deep links.

 
Storio (github.com)

StorIO is a modern API for SQLiteDatabase and ContentResolver. Offers a powerful & simple set of operations: Put, Get, Delete, via an API with type safety, immutability & thread-safety. Offers RxJava support as well.

 
CatKit (github.com)

Android library for cat placeholder images.

 

Tools

 
Android DPI Calculator - IDEA/Android Studio Plugin (plugins.jetbrains.com)

An Android DPI calculator that allows you to calculate different sizes in all available default densities on Android platform, i.e.: xxxhdpi, xxhdpi, xhdpi, hdpi, mdpi, ldpi and tvdpi.

 

Videos

 
link image   #droidconDE 2015: Layout traversals on Android (www.youtube.com)

What happens behind the scenes in requestLayout() call? What kind of layout optimizations Android implements? In this talk, Lucas Rocha goes through some of the key steps that the Android UI framework takes to display your UI on the screen, from a layout perspective.

 
Android Camera2 API by Huyen Tue Dao (www.youtube.com)

Huyen Tue Dao presents on the Camera2 API at the GDG Boulder meetup.

 
Learning RxJava (for Android) by example (www.youtube.com)

A presentation aimed at beginners who have heard about RxJava and want to see what all the fuss is about. Kaushik Gopal (co-host of Fragmented podcast) provides primers on RxJava and RxAndroid, then looks at implementing real-world use cases in Android with RxJava.