Android Weekly - Free weekly Android & Kotlin development newsletter

Issue #92

March 9th, 2014

Articles & Tutorials

Testing Asynchronous Tasks on Android (codetalk.de)
Testing Asynchronous Tasks on Android is not easy. In this post by Enrique López Mañas you will learn how he does it by using the CountDownLatch class.

Blurring Images – Part 4 (blog.stylingandroid.com)

Mark Allison continues his series on blurring images. In this article he takes a look at performing the blur in Java to remove the marshaling between memory spaces, and attempt to get better performance.

Lets try Android Game Development with AndEngine (pathofacoder.com)
Here's a quick introduction of the first steps to getting an AndEngine app up & running.

Developing Applications with Voice Recognition Features (intel.ly)

Android can’t recognize speech, so a typical Android device cannot recognize speech either. Or, is there a way it can? In this article Stanislav Pavlov, from the Intel development team, writes a little sample app that demonstrates using voice search in applications.

Jobs

Android Engineer @ Uber.com (San Francisco)
Uber is building an Android solution from the ground up and needs your crazy good skills. Own new features from day one, experiment with brand new functionality, and contribute to the design process while reaching millions of users across the globe.

Senior Android Developer @ UberConference (Bay Area)
Help architect, build, iterate and manage our set of mobile application and website products. Create innovative applications for the Google Android platform. Partner closely with our design team to produce an application that flows seamlessly with our users.

Senior iOS / Android Developer @ Answers.com (ForeSee) (Vancouver, Canada)
Answers.com is building a enterprise analytics solution across device platforms and is looking for an experienced mobile developer to help guide development, solve tough technical problems relating to performance and data quality, and help bring industry best practices to the development of customer-facing SDK's.

Libraries & Code

DebugLog (github.com)
This little library pimps your log output. It automatically infers the class as a tag and the method it was called from.

EmailAutoCompleteTextView (github.com)

EmailAutoCompleteTextView is an AutoCompleteTextView optimized for email auto-complete. Since this view uses AccountManager to get the emails on the device, you must include the GET_ACCOUNTS permission.

TypedPreferences (github.com)
This library for Android provides classes which allow to store and retrieve settings from the preferences. There is an individual class for each native type.

U+2020 (github.com)
A sample Android app by Jake Wharton which showcases advanced usage of Dagger among other open source libraries. There are a lot of gems in there so definitely check it out.

ListBuddies (github.com)
This android library is a pair of auto-scroll circular parallax ListViews like the ones in the expedia app.

Shimmer for Android (github.com)
Shimmer-android is an Android port of Facebook Shimmer library for iOS.

Java Deferred / Promise library (jdeferred.org)
JDeferred is a Java Deferred/Promise library similar to JQuery's Deferred Object

News

Google And Intel Release x86 Image With Google APIs (www.androidpolice.com)

Google and Intel have finally shipped an x86 system image with Google API support.

Webinar – App Monetization (bit.ly)
Great opportunity for all Android developers to take a look at and discuss the Creative Ways to Improve App Discovery Monetization. Non-conventional approaches and the best practices. The Webinar will take place on March, 12th at 12:00PM PST

Tools

Android Dev Tools (www.kpbird.com)

In this post Ketan Parmar gives us a quite comprehensive list of useful tools that are related to Android Development.

db_getter.sh (gist.github.com)
Get the database from an Android app (Android 4.3+) with this handy snippet.

Sneak peek of Gradle Please Alfred 2 Workflow (plus.google.com)
Alfred is a productivity app for Mac OS X. Evelio is working on an extension to Alfred that will use Gradle Please to help easily add dependencies to your Gradle build.

Android Studio 0.5.0 Released (tools.android.com)
Some changes include: New bundled version of IntelliJ 13.1 EAP build, Gradle offline mode for sync and build, Support for build variants in library projects.

Gradle Retrolambda Plugin (github.com)
This plugin will automatically build your java or android project with retrolambda, giving you lambda goodness on java 6 or 7. It relies on the wonderful retrolambda by Esko Luontola.