Issue #242

January 29th, 2017

Articles & Tutorials

 
link image   Common Design Patterns for Android (www.raywenderlich.com)

Matt Luedke introduces a few common design patterns for Android that you can use while developing apps.

 
ObjectBox - The new Mobile Database (greenrobot.org)

ObjectBox is a new mobile object database optimized for performance. With ObjectBox, the greenRobot team is bringing technology from NoSQL server databases to mobile.

 
MVC vs. MVP vs. MVVM on Android (realm.io)

The best practices approach for organizing Android applications into logical components has evolved over the last few years. The community has largely moved away from MVC to MVP and MVVM patterns.

 
Building Google Actions with Java (medium.com)

Mirek Stanek introduces his unofficial Google Actions Java SDK along with some examples.

 
Android gooey FAB is easy (myhexaville.com)

Here's how to implement a visually appealing animated Floating Action Button.

 
link image   What Comes in Kotlin 1.1 for Android Developers? (blog.elpassion.com)

Paweł Gajda researched the upcoming changes released in past four EAP milestones and goes through those that might impact Android Development.

 
Understanding the Power of Firebase Security Rules (medium.com)

Femi Taiwo realized that properly setting up your Firebase rules to protect your database can be difficult, so here's a three-part series on this — first and second on Firebase Realtime Database Rules and the next on Firebase Storage Rules.

 
Reactive apps with Model-View-Intent - Part 3 (hannesdorfmann.com)

In the previous part Hannes Dorfmann discussed how to implement a simple screen with the Model-View-Intent pattern with an unidirectional data flow. In this blog post he builds a more complex screen with MVI with the help of a state reducer

 
Data Classes in Kotlin: save a good bunch of lines of code (antonioleiva.com)

Antonio Leiva demonstrates the power of Kotlin's data classes.

 
Simple Things – Part 4 (blog.stylingandroid.com)

In this final article of the series, Mark Allison extends the Android Things app further to include barometric pressure, as well.

 
Android Dev Tip #3: A gotcha with color/transparent (android.jlelse.eu)

If you’re creating a gradient in xml with a part being completely transparent, be really careful when using @android:color/transparent.

 
A simple hack to get more downloads 🚀 (www.novoda.com)

In the spirit of continuous app store optimisation (ASO), the Novoda team decided to find out if they could increase downloads by adding emojis to an app’s short description in the Play Store.

 
TDD Your UI Layer (www.donnfelker.com)

Donn Felker shows that it really is possible to use Test Driven Development with your UI layer.

 
Espresso Test Addiction: An Anti-pattern (www.philosophicalhacker.com)

The Philosophical Hacker worries that espresso and espresso recorder are contributing to the formation of a UI testing addiction in the Android community. He worries, moreover, that this addiction that will probably lead to less testing in the long-run.

 

Sponsored

 
link image   PSPDFKit - The industry leading PDF framework (pspdfkit.com)

Add PDF support to your Android app with ease! Enjoy a blazing fast viewer, search, annotations, and document editing, all with fully customizable UI built by an experienced team & easy to integrate. Let us focus on the details of PDF so you can focus on delivering the best experience to your users.

 

Jobs

 
Android Engineer (San Francisco, CA)

We’re looking for a smart, creative and self motivated individual to join the Scoop team! You should thrive in a fast-paced startup environment, and have 1+ years in a full-time Android/mobile development role. We're trying to fix traffic with carpooling, and we need your help! Great pay/benefits!

 
VSCO Android Engineer (Oakland, CA)

We are looking for an Android Engineer to play an integral role on our mobile team. As our Android community continues to expand rapidly, we need a proactive engineer to work on a wide range of VSCO products. You will also work closely with other teams to craft and execute new features.

 
Software Engineer, Android (Zürich, Switzerland)

We strive to develop the world’s leading mobile banking platform. For that reason we are looking for motivated and experienced Android Engineers, who are passionate about high quality products, clean code and have a strong knowledge of Android UI design principles.

 

Libraries & Code

 
link image   PreviewSeekBar (github.com)

A SeekBar suited for showing a preview of something. As seen in Google Play Movies.

 
AndroidTestingBox (roroche.github.io)

Android project to experiment various testing tools

 
FunctionalRx2 (github.com)

FunctionalRx2 is a collection of constructs to simplify a functional programming approach to Java and Android

 
gradle-completion (github.com)

Gradle tab completion for bash and zsh

 
ObjectBox (github.com)

ObjectBox is a superfast mobile database for objects

 
superlightstack (github.com)

A lightweight library which helps to create a view stack as a replacement for fragments and activities, provides transitions and persistence

 
PicassoFaceDetectionTransformation (github.com)

An Android image transformation library providing cropping above Face Detection (Face Centering) for Picasso.

 
cwac-netsecurity (github.com)

This library contains a backport of the Android 7.0 network security configuration subsystem

 

News

 
link image   Android Studio 2.3 Beta 3 (tools.android.com)

Android Studio 2.3 Beta 3 includes a several bug fixes, and performance improvements.

 
RxJava Release 2.0.5 (github.com)

This new version includes the ParallelFlowable API that allows parallel execution of a few select operators such as map, filter, concatMap, flatMap, collect, reduce and so on.

 

Videos & Podcasts

 
link image   Be together, not the same (www.youtube.com)

While in London, Huyen asks Anastasia López about her Droidcon London talk about the Android community and diversity and how we can "Be together, not the same" by doing small things to improve our every day culture.

 
Catching up with Jake Wharton (talkingkotlin.com)

The team speaks to Jake Wharton about his interest in Kotlin and the adoption process at Square. They cover one of Jake's favourite features which are extension functions and properties and how RxBinding creates these by parsing Java source code.

 
UI UX development with GDE Raveesh (fragmentedpodcast.com)

In this episode the Fragmented team change the tune and talk with Raveesh Bhalla; Raveesh is a GDE for design specialized in UI/UX.