Articles & Tutorials

A journey on the Android Main Thread (corner.squareup.com)
A nice post by the square dev team about lifecycle of an Activity. You'll learn about how orientation changes affects the main thread and how to resolve lifecycle issues.

TextClock Version 2 – Part 1 (blog.stylingandroid.com)
Mark Allison revisits his text clock project from January 2013 to add some KitKat touches.

Using the new Gradle-based Android build system (plus.google.com)
Cyril Mottier shares a newer example of how to set up a professional project using the new Gradle build system.

A Recipe for writing responsive REST clients on Android (birbit.com)
Android development is easy but making the app resilient is hard. Yigit Boyar shares some ideas and some code to make it easier.

ProTip: Troubleshooting app bugs related to scheduled tasks (plus.google.com)
Roman Nurik shares a tip about two awesome tools for troubleshooting bugs related to scheduled tasks.

RxJava and Android: working with subjects (howrobotswork.wordpress.com)
RxJava’s observers and observables offer a great way to manage multiple threads and async processes in Android development.

Sponsored

Jobs

Senior Game Developer @ Social Point (hire.jobvite.com)
As a Senior Game Developer you will build our amazing games and contribute to improve them daily. You need strong background in C++, solid understanding of 2D/3D graphics and math involved in computer graphics and previous game development experience. Location: Barcelona.

Senior Android Engineer for realtor.com (ch.tbe.taleo.net)
Do you like to work on mobile applications that interact with millions of users? Would you like to become well versed in many of today’s top mobile platforms? We're hiring Mobile Engineers to work on flagship app - realtor.com/mobile. Location: San Jose, CA.

Libraries & Code

AndroidStaggeredGrid (github.com)
An Android staggered grid view which supports multiple columns with rows of varying sizes.

Android Demo for beginners (github.com)
This nice demo code by Nicolas Jafelle shows you how to create a Fragment and associate to an Activity, make asynchronous call using SafeAsyncTask, connect to Foursquare's API using Retrofit with OkHttp and parse Json with Gson.

Sprinkles (github.com)
Sprinkles is a boiler-plate-reduction-library for dealing with databases in android applications. It uses annotations to enrich your model classes and it has a lot of cool features like migrations, transactions and out of the box cursors. It does not support relations and this is by design. The code is on github and soon on maven central.

GhostLog (github.com)
Jeff Gilfelt has released Ghost Log as open source. It's an Android application that displays the device logcat buffer in a system overlay window.

News

1-Star Ratings Since 'Quick Rating' Widget (www.androidpolice.com)
Earlier this month an update to the Play Store began rolling out with a brand new ratings widget appearing on the main landing page and within landing pages for each major section. Several developers are reporting a drastic rise in 1-star ratings on otherwise successful apps.

Programming Mobile Applications for Android Handheld Systems (www.coursera.org)
A free Coursera course starting on January 21st: Introduction to the design and implementation of applications for handheld systems, such as smartphones and tablets, running the Android Platform.

Business

Do Not Track California Privacy Law Changes Effective Today (www.iubenda.com)
If you publish apps in the United States, it is important to know about California's Do Not Track privacy law, CalOPPA and changes that went into effect Jan 1, 2014.