Issue #74

October 25th, 2013

Articles & Tutorials

Link Bild Getting Your SMS Apps Ready for KitKat (android-developers.blogspot.com)

To provide you with a fully supported set of APIs for building SMS apps and to make the user experience for messaging more predictable, Android 4.4 (KitKat) makes the existing APIs public and adds the concept of a default SMS app, which the user can select in system settings. This means that if you are using the hidden SMS APIs on previous platform versions, you need to make some adjustments so your app continues to work when Android 4.4 is released later this year.

 
Link Bild How I made an Android game in 23 days (bigosaur.com)

Milan Babuškov shares how he created an Android game in 23 days for Ludum Dare, with a blog post for each day.

 

ActionBarCompat - Part 3 (blog.stylingandroid.com)
In this article Mark Allison takes a look at the Java code and begin working on the changes that needed to make it backwardly compatible to API level 7 using ActionBarCompat.

Automating our Android App with Gradle and DeployGate (www.snap-interactive.com)
This blog post shows how Snap Interactive creates Android app builds and distributes it automatically to testers via the DeployGate service.

Interview with Android indie developer interview: Veaceslav Grec (androiddreamrevised.blogspot.com)
Another Android indie developer interview by Bartek.

Setting up the Android Google Volley ImageLoader for NetworkImageView (cypressnorth.com)
Matthew Mombrea shows some code for hooking up Volley's ImageLoader and NetworkImageView

Sponsored

Link Bild Firebase: A Real-Time Backend for Your Android App (www.firebase.com)

Using Firebase's Java SDK, you can easily add real-time features to your app without worrying about networking, scaling, or writing complicated server code. Firebase's synchronization-based API is perfect for building cross-platform apps, and handles caching, reconnecting, and data merging. Get started in 2 minutes with the Quickstart Guide.

 
Link Bild In-App Customer Support (launchbit.com)

Finally, native customer support for iOS and Android apps. Increase retention and reduce negative reviews.

 

Design

Link Bild Stateful nine-patches with Smart Objects (plus.google.com)

Android Design Protip from Roman Nurik and Richard Ngo about using Smart Objects and Layer Based Slices to optimize production of stateful nine-patch assets.

 

Libraries & Code

SlidingUpPanel (github.com)
The 2.2 version of the Umano Android app features a sexy sliding up draggable panel for the currently playing article. This type of a panel is a common pattern also used in the Google Music app and the Rdio app. This is an open source implementation of this component that you are free to take advantage of in your apps.

Tools

How to get the Monokai Color theme in Android Studio (envyandroid.com)
If you are tired of the default look of Android Studio (and IntelliJ which it is based on), this article show how to switch to the better looking Monokai theme from Sublime Text 2.

Link Bild Android Studio Tips & Tricks: Moving Around (www.developerphil.com)

In this series of posts, Philippe Breault will go from very basic productivity tricks that everyone should know to more advanced topics in Android Studio.