Issue #117

August 31st, 2014

Articles & Tutorials

 
link image   Putting Your APKs on Diet (cyrilmottier.com)

It’s no secret to anyone, APKs out there are getting bigger and bigger. Cyril Mottier shares some tips and tricks to making slimmer apps.

 
Android iBeacon Patterns (blog.surecase.eu)

Beacon Patterns is a simple application that contains basic programming patterns about iBeacons which will allow you to create your iBeacon application even faster. This article describes some of these patterns in detail.

 
link image   Building Dynamic Custom Views (ryanharter.com)

Ryan Harter demonstrates how to create a scroll view has padding such that every item within it can be scrolled to the center of the view. On it’s surface this doesn’t seem complex, but when you consider the massive difference in screen sizes available on Android, things get a little more complicated.

 
Powerful New Messaging Features with GCM (android-developers.blogspot.com)

At Google I/O the general availability of several GCM capabilities was announced, including the GCM Cloud Connection Server, User Notifications, and a new API called Delivery Receipt. This post highlights the new features and how you can use them in your apps.

 
Match Timer – Part 2 (blog.stylingandroid.com)

In the previous article Mark Allison looked at some of the decisions behind re-writing the Footy Timer app in order to implement it on Android Wear. In this article he’ll begin looking at the code.

 
Make your app work with Android Wear in 4 easy steps (www.infinum.co)

Google introduced the full Android Wear SDK and now developers can finally start building awesome smartwatch applications. Want to learn how to make your existing apps work with Android Wear?

 
Getting Started with Android L Animations (ptrprograms.blogspot.com)

Among many other new features, Android L has brought a slew of new animations that can be added to your apps. This post goes over some of those new animations and how to implement them into an app.

 

Sponsored

 
link image   Rev up your app performance (developer.qualcomm.com)

Qualcomm Developer Network performance tools are designed to help your applications deliver superior performance. From system metrics and analysis to fix identification and power usage, you have fast access to the information you need to optimize your apps efficiently and effectively.

 

Design

 
link image   Designer's guide to DPI (sebastien-gabriel.com)

This guide is designed as a "get started" or introductory read for the starting to intermediate designer who wants to learn or get more knowledge about cross-DPI and cross-platform design from the very beginning.

 
UI Animation in Photoshop – Tutorial #1 (androiduiux.com)

Adobe After Effect is still the best tool to create complex and awesome animations, but with Photoshop, you can still create some simple and high quality UI animations to preview the animation idea to others. Taylor Ling show us how.

 
Sketch App wireframes for Material Design (plus.google.com)

For those of you who are using Sketch App instead of Adobe Illustrator, Vincent Tantardini re-created the latest Google wireframes for both Mobile and Tablet. Metrics and keylines are integrated. Hope this will help you save some time on your upcoming projects.

 

Jobs

 
Lead Android Engineer - realtor.com (San Jose, CA)

Great to design/build brand new consumer experience on Android apps. Current apps see 50K+ downloads/day! 30 million unique users/month! * help design & build applications * participate in R&D of highly scalable consumer facing mobile apps * 100% hands on coding Connect with us to learn more.

 
Android Engineer @ Karma (New York City)

Karma's vision is to make getting online seamless and headache-free by putting WiFi in the palm of your hand. We're looking for our first full-time Android engineer who will have the opportunity to own new features from day one, and build an Android experience that is second to none.

 
Android @ Expensify (San Francisco, CA)

We've created a cross-platform mobile framework, YAPL, that uses native controls. The Android implementation isn't quite up to our standards and we'd love your expertise to help it get there! With over 2M users, we're looking for an Android developer to help us scale!

 

Libraries & Code

 
link image   AndroidSwipeLayout (github.com)

A library that reveals controls with a swipe gesture. Can be easily integrated in anywhere, ListView, GridView, ViewGroup.

 
TwistVolley (github.com)

Extension to the Volley library adding an easy to use wrapper around Volley that sets up the RequestQueue and Image cache for the ImageLoader. It also provides an easy Picasso inspired image loading system based on the ImageLoader.

 
Widgets (github.com)

This new library has a Ripple View base class for adding to your project.

 
QuickReturn (github.com)

QuickReturn is a library which showcases the QuickReturn UI pattern. It can be used for header views, footer views, or both header views and footer views. Supports both ScrollView and ListView and comes with examples of Twitter, Facebook, and Google+ QuickReturn views.

 
Foundry (bitbucket.org)

Tired of manually setting the typefaces of all your views and cluttering your logic with presentation code? Foundry lets you style the typefaces of your views in your XML layout files and styles.

 
SystemUiHelper (chris.banes.me)

Here's a Gist from Chris Banes and Roman Nurik to help with dealing with Android System UI visibility across the different API levels.

 

Tools

 
Android Fragment Code Generator (techisfun.github.io)

A simple boilerplate code generator for Android Fragments

 

Business

 
Want to get featured in the Google Play Store? (prolificinteractive.com)

There were a lot of technical and design-related hurdles to overcome in order to meet Google’s standards for a featured app. This post highlights some of the most important requirements encountered in the process, and hopefully make your next featuring process more seamless.