Issue #123

October 12th, 2014

Articles & Tutorials

 
link image   Using Gestures (ryanharter.com)

Modern Android apps often make use of gesture interaction to provide fluid, natural interaction with the app. There are a few ways to handle these interactions, and in this post Ryan Harter covers some of the basics for easily adding gesture support to your app

 
Advocating Against Android Fragments (corner.squareup.com)

Pierre-Yves Ricau, a developer at Square, writes an article about issues they've run into using Fragments, and one possible alternative approach.

 
Probing with Gradle (lucasr.org)

Up until now, Lucas Rocha's Probe library relied on dynamic view proxies generated at runtime to intercept View calls. It now has a brand new Gradle plugin which seamlessly generates build-time proxies for your app. This means virtually no overhead at runtime!

 
Building multiple APKs inside Android Studio (androiddevcorner.blogspot.com)

Build variants are a huge feature for Android development. The use cases for such a feature are many. It can be as simple as having a free version of your app and a paid version. Mike Wallace shares an overview of how the feature can work for you.

 
Episode 14: Accessibility (androidbackstage.blogspot.com)

New Android Developers Backstage podcast: Tor and Chet are joined in this episode by Alan Viverette from the UI Toolkit team.

 
Grokking RxJava, Part 4: Reactive Android (blog.danlew.net)

RxAndroid is an extension to RxJava built just for Android. It includes special bindings that will make your life easier. This final article in the series takes a closer look at how to use it.

 

Sponsored

 
link image   Grow your mobile app with Facebook (developers.facebook.com)

Looking to grow your mobile startup? Together with some great partners, Facebook is offering up to $60,000 in free tools and services, mentorship from and 1:1 contact with Facebook employees, as well as a global startup community. Apply today to become a member of FbStart!

 
link image   LTE Broadcast SDK now available to developers (developer.qualcomm.com)

The Qualcomm® LTE Broadcast SDK is designed to allow integration of LTE Broadcast for streaming video and file delivery into Android apps. It defines a common API for consistent app behavior and UX across operators — perfect for multicast of live TV/sporting events with multiple video feeds/data.

 
link image   Get 5 to 15 Android Job Offers in One Week! (hired.com)

Over 1,300 companies compete for the best Android developers on Hired. You'll receive multiple, transparent offers from top tech companies before you interview. You'll decide who you want to talk to.

 

Design

 
link image   Paper, Lighting, And How To Get Your Icon Ready (www.androidpolice.com)

In lieu of an official spec, Liam Spradlin thought I might be helpful to post a quick guide to the new style of Google's app icons, compiled from observations on all the icons he's seen so far.

 

Jobs

 
Android Engineer at Weebly (San Francisco, CA)

Have you built a well-designed Android app or two? Can you build a first version and iterate quickly on an idea, with an eye for creating things that look good? If you are willing to work hard for a huge upside and want to contribute to a fun working environment, join the mobile team at Weebly!

 
Android Engineer (Zurich, Switzerland)

We are looking for experienced Android engineers to join our team in Zurich, as part of Numbrs. Come and help us to revolutionise the banking industry. Zurich is at the technological forefront, much like our cutting edge banking app Numbrs.

 

Libraries & Code

 
Introducing ActionView for Android (plus.google.com)

Inspired by some fancy Material showcases Markus Hi created a widget which can tween between different actions dynamically. Transitions between drawer navigation, back, close and plus are built-in.

 
Picasso and CircularTransform Example (gist.github.com)

A Picasso and CircularTransform example from Donn Felker

 

News

 
link image   Google Play Services 6.1 (android-developers.blogspot.com)

Google Play services 6.1 adds Enhanced Ecommerce analytics support from Google Tag Manager and offers new improvements to the Google Drive Android API. With the latest release, we’re also including a refresh of the Google Fit developer preview, so that you can test your fitness apps on any Android device.

 
Updated Cross-Platform Tools in Google Play Game Services (android-developers.blogspot.com)

Game developers, Google has updated some of their popular developer tools to give you a consistent set of game services across platforms, a refreshed UI based on material design, and new tools to give you better visibility into what users are doing in your games.

 

Tools

 
Android Studio 0.8.12 Released (tools.android.com)

Android Studio 0.8.12 released with several new features, including a brand new AVD manager.

 

Videos

 
(bitchy) App Clinic (www.youtube.com)

The (bitchy) app clinic barcamp session from Droidcon Paris

 
Scaling Android Development at Twitter (www.youtube.com)

In this talk, Jan Chong from Twitter discusses how Twitter moved to develop at scale from a single team-based development model to a project based development model that welcomes contributions from across the company and highlight some of the challenges that they ran into on the way.

 

Events

 
Connected Car Hackathon in Berlin (www.hack.institute)

October 18-19th will be a hackathon organized by Bosch. The main topic will be around the mySPIN SDK - mySPIN is the smartphone integration for cars like the Range Rover Evoque. There will be great prizes for the best car app or app adaption for the car - that means you can also bring your existing app and use the SDK to enhance it.