Issue #166

August 16th, 2015

Articles & Tutorials

 
link image   Face Detection in Google Play services (android-developers.blogspot.com)

With the release of Google Play services 7.8, Google added new Mobile Vision APIs, which include a new Face API that finds human faces in images and video better and faster than before.

 
Effective Java for Android developers : Item 1 (fragmentedpodcast.com)

What do Effective Java items look like through the eyes of an Android developer? Fragmented podcast introduces the very first of these venerable “Items”: Consider providing static factory methods instead of constructors.

 
FlatBuffers in Android (frogermcs.github.io)

JSON is lightweight and great. But if you need even more performance you can use Flatbuffers. FlatBuffers is an evolution of protocol buffers that includes object metadata. In this post you'll learn the basics and how to use them in your app.

 
link image   Iconify just got a lot better (blog.joanzapata.com)

Iconify is a cool little library to manage icons in your Android app. This post gives a little introduction and the source code is available on GitHub.

 
How to deal with permission denial on Android M (plus.google.com)

Here's a short tip from Google on how to deal with changes in Android M's permissions.

 
Curved Motion – Part 2 (blog.stylingandroid.com)

Very few developers are lucky enough to be able to specify minSdkVersion="21" and use arcMotion Scene transitions. Mark Allison shows a really neat way to get very similar behavior back to API 11 (Honeycomb) which is almost as easy.

 
Barcode Detection in Google Play services (android-developers.blogspot.com)

With the release of Google Play services 7.8 Google added new Mobile Vision APIs which provides the Barcode Scanner API to read and decode a myriad of different barcode types quickly, easily and locally.

 
Game Programming Patterns (gameprogrammingpatterns.com)

Game Programming Patterns is a collection of patterns the author found in games that make code cleaner, easier to understand, and faster. Here's the free online version.

 
Quick return with CoordinatorLayout (medium.com)

In this post you'll learn how to use the CoordinatorLayout to create behavior that will provide easy quick return functionality.

 
Publish with Gradle on Bitbucket (medium.com)

In this post you'll learn how to include a private library via gradle from Bitbucket.

 
How to mock Android AsyncTask without mocking libraries (marcouberti.net)

In this post by Marco Uberti you'll learn how to mock an AsyncTask without external mocking libraries like Mockito or PowerMock.

 
Proximity Beacon API (medium.com)

Google recently announced the release of their cross-platform BLE Beacon format. In this post the guys from Ribot Labs took a look at it and show you how to use this new API to manage your beacons.

 

Sponsored

 
link image   Automate CI Builds and Tests for Your Apps (ship.io)

Check out Ship.io for easy cloud CI for native Android apps. Build, test & deploy across multiple platforms & devices. Ship supports Gradle, the latest Android OS & more. Special $100 credit for our Android Dev Weekly friends. Enter promo code androiddevweekly after signing up!

 
link image   Develop Faster with Intel® INDE (software.intel.com)

Cross platform meets native app performance with Intel® INDE. Save time, code natively and integrate tools into your preferred IDE. The Intel® Integrated Native Developer Experience (Intel® INDE) provides tools, support and IDE integration for apps on Intel® Architecture. Free download.

 
link image   Meet 2,000+ companies in one week! (hired.com)

Whether you're looking for a new job or just testing the water, Hired is there for you. In 1 week you'll get 5+ offers from top tech companies around the US and UK. Want to learn more? Check out Hired today!

 

Design

 
link image   A Closer Look At The Design Of Hangouts 4.0 (www.androidpolice.com)

Google says this is Hangouts' update to material design, but what exactly does that mean for the app? There's more here than just a new FAB, so Liam Spradlin takes a closer look at some of the notable design changes in Hangouts 4.0.

 

Jobs

 
Android Engineer - Help us build an SDK (Remote)

We are building PSPDFKit for Android using RxJava & C++ 14. It's a challenging project that is used in many apps and there's plenty of work to be done. We have a talented team, who enjoy the benefits of working in a remote environment. If you're up for a challenge, send us your resume.

 

Libraries & Code

 
Awesome Android Testing (github.com)

Nice curated list of Android testing frameworks.

 
ReactiveNetwork (github.com)

ReactiveNetwork is an Android library listening network connection state and change of the WiFi signal strength with RxJava Observables

 
android-apt 1.7 released (plus.google.com)

Hugo Visser has published an update to android-apt, a gradle plugin that assists in working with annotation processors in combination with Android Studio.

 
Android Saripaar (github.com)

UI form validation library for Android.

 
MaterialShowcaseView (github.com)

A Material Design themed ShowcaseView for Android.

 
MaterialSheetFab (github.com)

Library that implements the floating action button to sheet transition from Google's Material Design documentation. It can be used with any FAB library on Android 4.0+ (API levels >= 14).

 
Android Fillable Loaders (github.com)

Android fillable progress view working with SVG paths. This is a nice option too if you want to create an interesting branding logo for your app.

 
WatchTower (github.com)

A sample application created to test, explore and demonstrate the Proximity Beacon API.

 

Tools

 
LayoutCast (github.com)

LayoutCast is a Android Studio plugin to cast every change in your Java source code or resources (including library projects) to your phone or emulator within 5 sec, without restarting your application. (Currently Mac only)

 

Videos

 
link image   Android Dialogs: Dan Lew (www.youtube.com)

Dan Lew chats with Chiu-Ki about themes and styles while surrounded by Android plushies!