Android weekly 199

ARTICLES & TUTORIALS

Android N: Introducing upgraded Notifications (medium.com)

Joe Birch takes a deep dive into some great new additions to the notifications API and how we can implement them into our Android applications.

Repository Design Pattern (medium.com)

This article demonstrates a great way to create an abstraction over your local SQLite data storage.

5 tips for preparing for Multi-window in Android N (medium.com)

Ian Lake shares 5 tips that will help prepare your app for multi-window with the release of Android N.

Use tasks to bring the stories to you (medium.com)

This week’s protip is about how to use a little known feature of JetBrains’ IDEs to minimize the back and forth between tasks and associated branches. In the IDE you can use the Tasks & Contexts menu to define tasks and switch between them.

RxAndroidBLE - most powerful tool for Bluetooth Low Energy coding(www.polidea.com)

Pawel Urban introduces RxAn­droid­Ble, the painkiller for An­droid's Blue­tooth Low En­ergy headaches. It is backed with Rx­Java, it ba­si­cally im­ple­ments com­pli­cated APIs as handy re­ac­tive ob­serv­ables.

Android Project Structure - an alternative way (medium.com)

In case if your screens consist of big amount of layouts, drawables, dimensions — it make sense to create separate resource folder for every screen.

An Introduction to AutoValue (ryanharter.com)

Value types in Java are hard. Well, not hard, but tedious. Google’s AutoValue library makes them much easier and has just received the long awaited update that adds the flexibility of extensions.

Using Kotlin For Tests in Android (medium.com)

Many developers are quite optimistic about Kotlin future for Android.But not everyone is ready to take a risk and start writing production code using new programming language. But what if we’ll use Kotlin only for tests?

Kotlin’s Android Roadmap (blog.jetbrains.com)

In the next few releases (1.0.X) JetBrains will continue improving their toolchain and libraries. Their current efforts are focused on three main areas: speeding up the development workflow, reducing the size of the runtime library and providing more complete tooling support.

Something O’Clock – Part 1 (blog.stylingandroid.com)

Mark Allison starts a new series about creating the watch face he released for April 1st. He will examine the 3 parts: the app which runs on the Wear device; the companion app which runs on the phone; and a common library which will contain some shared code & resources.

The dark side of Jack and Jill (trickyandroid.com)

In this article Pavel Dudka gathers his thoughts and concerns regarding the new Jack & Jill Android toolchain.

Presenters don't need lifecycle events (hannesdorfmann.com)

Hannes Dorfmann thinks that Presenters don’t need lifecycle callback methods and in this blog post he discusses why.

DESIGN

Animation in Mobile UX Design (uxplanet.org)

Well-designed animations make the experience feel crafted. In a human-centered design approach, where the user is the prime focus, animation actually creates a feeling of well-being once it’s discovered by users.

LIBRARIES & CODE

android-architecture (github.com)

Android Architecture Blueprints is meant to demonstrate possible ways to help with common application development problems. In this project Google offers the same application implemented using different architectural concepts and tools.

RxAndroidBLE (polidea.github.io)

RxAndroidBle is a powerful painkiller for Android's Bluetooth Low Energy headaches. It is backed by RxJava, implementing complicated APIs as handy reactive observables.

AboutLibraries (mikepenz.github.io)

The AboutLibraries library allows you to easily create an used open source libraries fragment/activity within your app. As an extra feature you can also add an about this app section.

Xtendroid (github.com)

Xtendroid is a DSL (domain-specific language) for Android that reduces boilerplate code while providing tooling support. Xtendroid supports both Eclipse and IntelliJ/Android Studio, including code completion, debugging, and so on.

VIDEOS & PODCASTS

Droidcon SF Keynote: Android Development Today(www.youtube.com)

Chet Haase and Romain Guy Droidcon SF 2016 keynote

Talking Gradle with GDE Annyce Davis (fragmentedpodcast.com)

In this episode the team talks Gradle with the amazing and awesome Annyce Davis. We deal with the basics of Android’s build system and dabble with some tips on improving your build times.

Android Dialogs: Lisa Neigut (www.youtube.com)

Finally, an Android Dialogs episode about... Dialogs! Lisa Neigut tells us how she use Dialogs to focus text input, and two awesome tricks to position your Dialog as an overlay.

Android Developers Backstage 46: Softwear (androidbackstage.blogspot.com)

In this episode, Tor and Chet* talk with Zak Cohen from the Android Wear team in London about his work on watch faces, graphics, and many other Android projects he's been involved with

Common RxJava Mistakes (www.youtube.com)

RxJava is a powerful framework, but there are a lot of common issues developers run into when getting started with it. Dan Lew goes over a bunch of common mistakes and best practices when it comes to working with RxJava.