Articles & Tutorials

FragmentTransactions & Activity State Loss (www.androiddesignpatterns.com)
Alex Lockwood recently published a blog post on FragmentTransactions & Activity State Loss, a subject that has always been a little confusing, at least until now!

Respecting Audio Focus (android-developers.blogspot.com)
Kristan Uccello, Google Developer Relations, reminds developers that with multiple apps potentially playing audio it's important to think about how they should interact.

Read the code: IntentService (www.androidzeitgeist.com)
This article by Android Zeitgeist is about the IntentService class of Android. Extending the IntentService class is the best solution for implementing a background service that is going to process something in a queue-like fashion.

Android Gradle - Building Unique Build Variants (brad-android.blogspot.com)
Brad McManus shares a technique for solving ContentProvider issues when building several app variants via Gradle.

Getting Started in Android Game Dev - Part 4 (obviam.net)
This is the fourth part of a libgdx tutorial in which the author creates a 2d platformer prototype modeled after Star Guard.

Libraries & Code

Parceler (github.com)
Compared with traditional Serialization, Parcelables take on the order of 10x less time to both serialize and deserialize. Parceler is a code generation library that generates Android Parcelable boilerplate source code quickly and easily.

MonthCalendarWidget (github.com)
Here's a gorgeous responsive Month Calendar app widget for Android 4.1+. by Roman Nurik

Color Pickers (gmariotti.blogspot.de)
Gabriele Mariotti has published a comprehensive list of Color Picker Libraries for Android.

StyledDialogs for Android (github.com)
We covered that library in Issue #64 but it got a major upgrade, so we cover it again: It's a library that makes styling and using dialogs a piece of cake.

Tools

AppThwack rolls out integrated testing (plus.google.com)
AppThwack rolls out Android app testing with Android Studio and Gradle. It lets you easily run your unit tests on their set of mobile devices direct from Studio or your Gradle build.

Android Studio plugin (github.com)
SelectorChapek is an Android Studio plugin that automatically generates drawable selectors from appropriately named Android resources.

Droid Inspector (www.sriramramani.com)
This tool gives you a 3D display of the Views your app, making it easier to find overdraw issues

Using Gradle and need to know the dependency string for your favourite library? Check out "Gradle, please". (gradleplease.appspot.com)
Using Gradle and need to know the dependency string for your favourite library? Check out "Gradle, please". Just type in the package name and copy and paste the right build entry referencing the package's latest version.

Videos

Beautiful Design Summer 2013 Highlights (www.youtube.com)
Join Nick Butcher, Adam Koch and Roman Nurik as they discuss various elements of Android Design. This week, we'll run through some app design highlights from the 11 apps in the Beautiful Design Summer 2013 collection on Google Play.