Issue #79

November 30th, 2013

Articles & Tutorials

Link Bild Old WebView vs. Chromium backed WebView (www.timroes.de)

Since Android 4.4 the WebView is backed by Chromium and not by it’s own rendering engine anymore. Tim Roes did a large benchmark and now shows his results.

 

Using RxJava with Android (howrobotswork.wordpress.com)
RxJava is a Java implementation of Reactive Extensions developed by Netflix. This tutorial gets you started on how to do reactive programming on Android.

NotificationListenerService and KitKat (gmariotti.blogspot.de)
Android 4.4 (API 19) added new features to the NotificationListenerService and now we can have a lot of extra info about a notification.

Transition Animations – Part 3 (blog.stylingandroid.com)
In this article Mark Allison continues his series and takes a look at different use cases for animations and how to use different transitions.

Link Bild Android Property Animations: Introduction (cogitolearning.co.uk)

Property Animations let you animate essentially anything. You are not limited by predefined animation types or by the type of object that you want to animate.

 

Make Your ProgressBar Smoother (antoine-merle.com)
Antoine Merle shows a way to reproduce the smooth indeterminate horizontal progress bar, similar to what's seen in the GMail app.

Protip: The power of drawables (plus.google.com)
Flavien Laurent shares a quick tip about the power of drawables.

Performance Tuning On Android (blog.venmo.com)
Now that Venmo released their app, it was time to go that extra mile and make it as smooth as possible. They identified a few key areas that we wanted to optimize individually, and show how they achieved that optimization.

Design

Link Bild Export to Android Photoshop Script (www.uncorkedstudios.com)

Exporting assets from Photoshop can be a time consuming process. This little script helps you by automating this tedious task.

 

Jobs

Android Developer @ SFX Entertainment and Arc90 (arc90.com)
SFX Entertainment and Arc90 are looking for an Android Developer to help design and build a brand new music platform. There are opportunities to be involved in other areas of the platform as well (iOS, web, design, Clojure services, data science). Location: New York & Remote-friendly. Just write an email: brianb@arc90.com

Senior Android Mobile Engineer @ Eventbrite (hire.jobvite.com)
We're hiring a mobile engineer to build innovative Android apps. We're building the platform & tools that are changing a massive industry & looking for talented people to join our team. Have solid experience with client-side Java & the Android SDK? Let's talk. Location: San Francisco, CA.

Libraries & Code

Butterknife 4.0 is available (plus.google.com)
Version 4.0 of Jake Wharton's view injection framework has just been released with many new features.

Sample Android Project: Movies (daniel-codes.blogspot.com)
Daniel Lew has released his sample application he worked on recently with talented designer Chris Arvin for a talk they gave at DroidCon UK 2013.

SmoothProgressBar (github.com)
A small Android library allowing you to have a smooth and customizable horizontal indeterminate ProgressBar.

Media Chooser (github.com)
Media choose is a library to browse & select videos and images from disk.

News

Link Bild How Google Shrank Android For Version 4.4 KitKat (readwrite.com)

Having finished the goal of making Android as smooth as butter, Google turned its attention to making the memory footprint of Android smaller while retaining that top-end functionality. This was called “Project Svelte” and the results were released in the latest version of Android, version 4.4 KitKat.

 

Tools

Screenshot Cleaner (plus.google.com)
Waza_be is working on an app for cleaning the status bar of your screenshots on device to clean them up and prepare them for the Play store and more.

Device frame generator app (f2prateek.com)
Here's a port of Roman Nurik's device frame generator web app to an Android app (source included).

Videos

Link Bild AnDevCon San Francisco 2013 Google Keynote (www.youtube.com)

Reto Meier talks about how the smartphone world has changed in the few short years since Android was launched, the increased importance of design, efficiency, and innovation, and how our users now demand magical experiences from their apps to live up to the beautiful new devices on which those apps run.

 

What's new in Android 4.4 KitKat interview (www.youtube.com)
Romain Guy and Chet Haase are interviewed at Devoxx, and discuss the latest and greatest in Android 4.4 KitKat.

Image processing on Android interview (www.youtube.com)
Nicolas Roard is one of the engineers behind the Android KitKat Gallery. Here he's interviewed at Devoxx and discusses image processing.