Issue #89

February 16th, 2014

Articles & Tutorials

Protip: A smoother app launch experience (plus.google.com)
On app launch, Android displays a simple preview window (based on your activity theme) as an immediate response to the user action. To ensure a smooth visual transition, your activity theme should match your full UI as closely as possible.

Nested Fragments and the Backstack - Part 3 (curioustechizen.blogspot.com)
Kiran Rao continues his series of articles on dealing with nested Fragments and properly restoring state.

MATCH_PARENT vs FILL_PARENT: The dos and don'ts (randomlytyping.com)
An interesting look at why the naming of the FILL_PARENT attribute was changed to MATCH_PARENT.

Make Your First Android App: Part 1/3 (www.raywenderlich.com)
Here's a new, up-to-date article on getting started with Android development.

Keeping Google Cloud Messaging For Android Working Reliably (blog.pushbullet.com)
This post focuses on using Google Cloud Messaging to deliver push messages. If you’re thinking instead of polling for updates while your app is in the background, please abandon those thoughts now.

Fast, Effective, Double-Checked Locking in Android and Java Apps (blog.newrelic.com)
Designing around and later debugging race conditions can be extremely time consuming and frustrating so it’s not uncommon to become a little overzealous with locking. Fortunately, there are a few simple patterns that make locking effective without unnecessarily impacting performance.

Link Bild New sample code, including Play Store-style tabs (plus.google.com)

Google has just published a bunch of new samples to the repository at developer.android.com/samples! If you're interested in NFC/HCE, UI patterns, Renderscript, or step counters, make sure to check out the repository.

 
Link Bild Mastering ProGuard for Building Lightweight Android Code (www.crashlytics.com)

ProGuard, a code optimization and obfuscation tool provided as part of the Android SDK, can be a double edge sword — it presents bootstrapping challenges but when applied correctly, provides tremendous benefits!

 

Sponsored

Link Bild Get up to $2,000 on top of your app revenue (appnext.com)

appnext offers extraordinary bonuses throughout February. Reach your first 100K impressions monetizing your Android apps and get additional $100. Do you want to set the bar even higher? We have something special for you too: hit 20K installs and get rewarded with $2,000 champion bonus.

 
Link Bild Speeding Up the Android* Emulator on Intel® Architecture (intel.ly)

In this article Costas Styliano will explain all the steps required to accelerator the Android Emulator on Intel® and how to work with it.

 

Jobs

Freelance w/Companies like Airbnb, IDEO & Life360 (Anywhere)
Work on special projects with great companies through Toptal. Set your weekly/hourly rate, and work from anywhere in the world as an Elite Android Developer. Apply today!

Libraries & Code

Muzei Live Wallpaper (github.com)
Roman Nurik open sources his latest creation, the Muzei Live Wallpaper. It's a live wallpaper that gently refreshes your home screen each day with famous works of art. It also recedes into the background, blurring and dimming artwork to keep your icons and widgets in the spotlight.

SuperToasts (github.com)
The SuperToasts library is an enhancement of the stock Android Toast class. This library offers developers new ways of communicating with their users. The idea for this library came from the UndoBar Library and the Crouton Library.

News

Link Bild Be a part of Creating What’s Next at MWC 2014 (www.mobileworldcongress.com)

GSMA Mobile World Congress is the place for mobile leaders to network and conduct business. This senior-level conference and technology exhibition brings together over 72,000 industry professionals, operators, application developers who are Creating What’s Next.

 

Animated graph of Android platform stats (plus.google.com)
Here's a nice animated gif chart of the changes in platform versions over the years.

Tools

NinjaMock (ninjamock.com)
NinjaMock is a new free tool for mobile app wireframes and website mockups.

Android Drawable Factory (github.com)
This is an open source Java application to help create and resize appropriate Drawable resources for your Android application

Specials

Link Bild AnDevCon Boston (www.andevcon.com)

AnDevCon, May 27-30 in Boston, is the world's top Android apps event. Free expo. Use code ANDROID for $200 discount. www.andevcon.com