Articles & Tutorials

Tricks to boost performance of ListView (optimizationtricks.blogspot.in)
Abhishek Birdawade shares some nice tricks to boost the performace of a ListView.

Building Complex Animations (cogitolearning.co.uk)
A nice blog post on how to develop complex animations. The tutorial will walk you through animating different properties and chaining the animations with AnimatorSet.

BackgroundViewPager (github.com)
The BackgroundViewPager creates an effect the Launcher Background. When user switch between fragments, the background will scroll within specific ratio to cover all fragments.

TextClock Version 2 – Part 3 (blog.stylingandroid.com)
Third part of Mark Allison's updated TextClock tutorial in which he demonstrates animations possible in app and lock screen widgets.

Preserve Your Launchers: Use Activity Aliases (blog.danlew.net)
When you deploy your Android app, the launcher Activity's manifest entry should be treated as a contract. Daniel Lew shows how to not annoy your users when you need to change your launcher activity.

Introducing the Google Drive Android API (googledevelopers.blogspot.com)
With the new developer preview of the Google Drive Android API in Google Play Services 4.1, you can add the convenience of Google Drive cloud storage to your apps without breaking a sweat. While Drive integration on Android was possible in the past, the new API creates a faster, seamless experience that enables your apps to integrate with the Drive backend within minutes.

Sponsored

Jobs

Mobile & Web App Development Project Manager (Arlington, VA)
The Project Manager will serve as the primary interface between the customer and our mobile/web development teams when delivering mobile development projects for iOS and Android apps, mobile websites, and responsive web applications.

Libraries & Code

Form Validation Library (github.com)
A simple library for validating user input in forms using annotations. With just a few lines of code you can validate all views and show feedback to the user. There is also an option for live validation and it's extensible so that you can write your own validations or adapters for custom views.

OpenStreetMap for Android (code.google.com)
osmdroid is a (almost) full/free replacement for Android's MapView (v1 API) class. It also includes a modular tile provider system with support for numerous online and offline tile sources and overlay support with built-in overlays for plotting icons, tracking location, and drawing shapes.

ExtendedCalendarView (github.com)
ExtendedCalendarView shows a calendar with the ability to display events on days. All events are stored in a content provider for easy access and the ability to have other app hook into your calendar if you choose.

StackBlur (github.com)
Do you want to blur some images really fast? StackBlur does exactly that leveraging several mechanisms (like RenderScript) if they are available. The library is compatible for Android versions 1.5 (so pretty much compatible with every device).

Tools

Android Image Resizer (github.com)
Android Image Resizer is a tool to resize android project image files(Drawables) with the proper sizes. It has now been updated to support xxxhdpi and xxhdpi as well.

android-apt for Gradle now supports library projects (plus.google.com)
Hugo Vissner has updated android-apt, now at version 1.2. You apply android-apt plugin to your Gradle build when you want to make use of annotation processors that generate code. It also makes sure that Android Studio will see the generated source, and that the annotation processor itself doesn't end up in your final APK...or library!

Videos