Issue #95

March 30th, 2014

Articles & Tutorials

Best practices for consuming APIs on Android (engineering.meetme.com)
In this post Bill Donahue explains some best practices when consume APIs. He shows a nice stack (Retrofit, OkHttp and GSON) that you can leverage to read from a REST API.

Link Bild Androids Overblown Fragmentation Problem Revisited (nickbradbury.com)

Nice post by Nick Bradbury on Androids fragmentation.

 

Android library projects tutorial (www.vogella.com)
This tutorial by Lars Vogel describes how to create and use library projects in Android.

SwipeRefreshLayout FTW (plus.google.com)
A short post by Chris Banes why you should use SwipeRefreshLayout instead of ActionBar-PullToRefresh.

Link Bild Blurring Images - Part 7 (blog.stylingandroid.com)

7th episode on how to create blurred images by Mark Allison.

 

How to convert your project to Gradle (cowboyprogrammer.org)
Nice post that explains the steps when you want to convert your project from Eclipse (Maven) to Android Studio (Gradle).

Measuring Text (chris.banes.me)
Chris Banes shows some tips and techniques for measuring text in custom controls

Fixing The Android Camera API (techblog.bozho.net)
The Android camera APIs are pretty bad, so here's a start at making a more reasonable wrapper for it.

Protip: Improving Gradle build performance (plus.google.com)
Stephan Linzner shares some tips about improving Gradle build performance.

Slides: How to setup unit testing in Android Studio (www.slideshare.net)
Presentation on how to setup unit testing in Android Studio by Tobias Preuss from GDG Android in Berlin.

Android App Polishing: Customizing Soft Keyboard Action Button (plus.google.com)
Cyril Mottier shows developers how to customize the soft keyboard action button.

Sponsored

Link Bild Creating cool animations and transitions in HTML5 app (intel.ly)

Recently, Adobe promulgated that Flash will no longer be supported on mobile devices. Thus HTML5 is the future. In this article Tao Wang from the Intel Team describes how to create cool animation with HTML5 Canvas on Intel Android devices

 

Jobs

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.

Android Software Craftsman @ Novoda (London and Berlin)
Novoda Limited have a fantastic opportunity for Android craftsman to work with our vibrant app development agency based out of London and Berlin. If you are passionate about the future of Android interconnected devices we would love to hear from you.

Sr. Android Engineer @ Etsy (Brooklyn, NY)
Etsy is seeking Senior Android Engineers to join a small, collaborative team that’s responsible for the end-to-end development of our Android apps for smartphones and tablets — supporting our long-term vision of bringing Etsy to every mobile device. This full-time position is based in Brooklyn, NY.

Android dev @ Wedding Party (Palo Alto, CA)
Wedding Party is a rapidly growing startup backed by incredible investors. We are looking for a passionate developer to join our Android team. You get to work with really smart people on a product that is changing the wedding industry and impacting millions of couples & their guests.

Android Engineer @ Meetup (New York, NY)
At Meetup, we bring people together, 15 million of them so far. We did all that with a web site and email reminders, but now we’re rebuilding Meetup around the expanding capabilities of mobile devices. As the second full-time Android Engineer at Meetup, you’ll work across teams to build new features.

Libraries & Code

Link Bild Wagon (github.com)

Passing information via activities is sometimes unintuitive to new developers. Wagon tries to be a easy method of passing extras between Android Activities using annotations.

 

Android DbInspector (github.com)
Android DbInspector provides a simple way to view the contents of the in-app database for debugging purposes. No need to pull the database from a rooted phone.

DobSliding (github.com)
DobSliding is an Open Source Android library that allows developers to develop applications with vertical sliding menus just like the Android notifications menu.

Android segmented control (github.com)
An Android segmented control implementation inspired by Segmented Controls for iOS.

SwipeRefreshLayout (developer.android.com)
...has landed in the compat library.

EasyAdapter (github.com)
Using AdapterViews has never been so easy. Inspired by the view holder design pattern, this library provides an easier way of linking AdapterViews and the underlying data for that view without having to implement your own Adapter. The EasyAdapter will do the tedious work for you.

News

Link Bild 10k subscribers (androidweekly.net)

This week Android Weekly hit the 10k subscriber mark! We're really thrilled that our little pet project made it so far. Thanks to all the people who are writing and submitting articles - we know how hard it is to publish - without your hard work this newsletter wouldn't be possible. We would also like to thank to all our subscribers - without you we probably wouldn't do it. Gyuri, Martin and Sebastian

 

Android Studio 0.5.3 Released (tools.android.com)
Android Studio 0.5.3 released with several small improvements for Gradle, as well as code templates.