Articles & Tutorials

New Android 4.3 APIs (developer.android.com)
Android 4.3 (JELLY_BEAN_MR2) is an update to the Jelly Bean release that offers new features for users and app developers. This document provides an introduction to the most notable new APIs.

Bust the Android Fragmentation Myth (www.slideshare.net)
In Chiu-Ki Chan's OSCON presentation, she covers the techniques to develop Android apps that works on all devices, no matter what screen sizes, aspect ratios and OS versions.

Gradle Build – Part 6 (blog.stylingandroid.com)
Marc Allison has released the sixth part of his "Gradle Build" series.

Android – Volley Library Example (java.dzone.com)
Volley is a library that makes networking for Android apps easier and most importantly, faster. Unfortunately the documentation is not very good. This blog post helps you to get started.

Rounded Avatars with Android (evel.io)
Rounded Avatars are a huge design trend. Evelio Tarazona Cáceres explains in his blog post how to create them with a custom made Drawable class.

ActionBarCompat (Part 1): How to use (antonioleiva.com)
Google has released a new version of its Support Library and it finally includes ActionBarCompat. We don’t know if ActionBarSherlock days of glory are over, but it’s true that the Android team has been working on ActionBarCompat so hard that it deserves at least one chance.

Binders & Window Tokens (www.androiddesignpatterns.com)
Binders are the cornerstone of Android's architecture; they abstract the low-level details of IPC from the developer, allowing applications to easily talk to both the System Server and others' remote service components. Alex Lockwood takes a closer look and explains how they work.

Libraries & Code

Code for Google I/O 2013 released (code.google.com)
The code for the Google I/O 2013 app has been released. If you want to have a sneak peak about internals and best practices of a cool app that runs on several display sizes then just download the code.

More complex ViewPager example (plus.google.com)
An interesting question has popped up by a fellow Android Developer: How do you display two fragments in a ViewPager in portrait and side-by-side in landscape? Jake Wharton wrote a little sample application to tackle that problem.

Hybrid ORM for Android + Phonegap (siminov.github.io)
We covered the Siminov before. This variant enables you to use the ORM from PhoneGap via JavaScript.

InstantAdapter (github.com)
The InstantAdapter library that helps you to save some time when writing custom adapters has been updated. It can now handle views that inherit from another view.

UI Validation Framework (github.com)
Android Saripaar is a simple, yet powerful rule-based UI validation library for Android. The frameworks is leveraging annotations to inject certain behaviour to the view. The annotations are compatible with other annotation frameworks such as AndroidAnnotations, RoboGuice, etc.

News