Articles & Tutorials

Yo Zuck, Fix This! (sriramramani.wordpress.com)
Sriram Ramani, a developer on the Firefox for Android team, takes a closer look at what could be optimized in the Facebook app's UI, using his DroidInspector tool.

Push, Don’t Poll – Using GCM (www.doubleencore.com)
Peter Elliott shares a simple, full stack example that will help highlight how to get Send-to-sync and message with payload push messages integrated with your app.

Design

Protip: Setting up Photoshop for designs (plus.google.com)
This Android design Protip by Roman Nurik and Peter Ng is about using point units in Adobe Photoshop to improve your workflow for Android graphic asset creation.

Libraries & Code

Card Library (github.com)
Card Library from Gabriele Mariotti provides an easy way to display a UI Card in your Android app.

CWAC-Camera: Taking Pictures made easy (github.com)
Taking pictures or videos using the built-in Camera class directly is not an easy task. It is full of edge and corner cases, not to mention its own set of per-device idiosyncracies. As a result, a ton of code is required to successfully show a preview, take a picture, and take a video. CWAC-Camera is an effort to standardize that "ton of code" and hide it behind a scalable API. Here, "scalable" means "simple things are simple, but complex things may be a bit complex".

News

Android Studio 0.2.10 Released (tools.android.com)
Android Studio 0.2.10 with traceview, resource lookup documentation, faster gradle imports and more.

How Google Taught Itself Good Design (www.fastcodesign.com)
Here's the story of how Matthias Duarte came to Google and in the two years since Page became CEO, Google has transformed itself from a search firm noted for middling user interfaces into the buzzworthy producer of some of the cleanest, most striking hardware and software anywhere.

Videos

Maps Live: New Features in the Google Maps Mobile APIs (www.youtube.com)
Google Maps API Team members Daniel Schramm and Chris Broadfoot discuss exciting new cross platform features in the Google Maps Android API. New to the latest versions are map padding, marker rotation, and flat markers.

Specials