1. Monitoring WebSockets with Stetho

    In this article I'm going to discuss how you can extend the functionality of Facebook's excellent Stetho library to debug WebSockets connections on Android. While Stetho allows you to inspect HTTP(S) requests, SQLite databases and Shared Preferences values out of the box, it does omit WebSockets. We are going…
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  2. Mobile animations with Lottie

    In this article I'm going to briefly review what options we have for animations for mobile apps in early 2018 and investigate the new kid on the block, the Lottie animation library from Airbnb. There will be a code sample available in this repo. [TOC] What we are trying to…
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  3. Building complex Android animations with RxJava

    In this article I'm going to discuss a little technique I am using to choreograph complex animations on Android by leveraging the power of RxJava. I'm going to show how it can result in clean and simple code that communicates intent and hides the boilerplate in reusable Kotlin extension methods…
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  4. IT Contracting in London: the good, the bad, the ugly

    As I'm nearing the end of my fist contract I figured I'd write a short non-technical article about what I learned in those first 6 months as a contractor. This might be particularly interesting to developers that live in the UK (or plan to move there) that might consider this…
    on contracting - Comments

  5. The easy way to ask for runtime permissions: the PermissionDispatcher library

    In this article I'm going to introduce my favourite way to handle permissions in Android, namely the PermissionDispatcher library. We're going to be looking at a simple example and hopefully illustrate why it is in my oppinion the easiest way of requesting permissions. The full code is available here. [TOC]…
    on Android Permissions - Comments

  6. Android Gesture Detection and Animations: creating a Swipe Button control

    In this article we're going to look at how to create a production-grade Swipe Button control that has the following features: tracks the finger with a transparent overlay supports flinging animates to a complete state moves right while swiping and also causes other content on the screen to move creating…
    on Android Animation - Comments

  7. How to improve performance of the Android Emulator on Windows

    In this article I'm going to share a quick tip about how to improve performance of the Android Emulator when running in Windows environment on a machine with a NVidia graphics card. What we are going to do is instruct the NVIDIA driver to use the GPU to render the…
    on Android - Comments

  8. Testable and robust architecture for Android projects

    In this article we're going to have a look at my go-to architecture for consuming REST APIs in Android. I will describe the basic concept behind it, the components and the way they interact with each other. The aims of this architecture are: Simplicity Readability Testability Robustness All the code…
    on Architecture MVP Testing - Comments

  9. Adding the Support Library through Maven

    In case you've missed it, at the last Google IO, Google announced that you can now add the Support Library directly from gradle without having to download the "support repository" anymore. This should come as good news to those of us who have to keep a Jenkins/Travis CI system…
    on Android Gradle - Comments

  10. An evening of Firebase - event review

    I attended Skill Matter's meetup/talk titled 'An evening of Firebase' and I wanted to share with you (and future me) my mental notes from what was presented. The evening consisted of two talks: one held by Google's Laurence Moroney and another by Beeline CTO Chetan Padia. The event was…
    on Android Firebase Event - Comments

  11. When gradle fails or Android's own version of the dependency hell

    Today I wanted to share with you a "war story" about a problem I encountered in one of my projects. It has to do with the way gradle versions its the dependency libraries and a poor little programmer trying to fix it one late Friday evening. Once upon a time…
    on Android Gradle - Comments

  12. A case against the Hungarian Notation on Android

    In this article we take a look at the Hungarian Notation and why it is in my opinion a bad idea. We take a look at possible causes why this habit started and dispel a few of the common myths about its usefulness. What is Hungarian Notation First of all,…
    on Android - Comments

  13. Deadlocks and ANRs

    In this article we're going to have a look at how to analyse a real-world Application Not Responding (ANR) trace, determine the cause (which turns out to be a deadlock in one of the libraries we're using) and eliminate it. We're also going to take the opportunity to provide a…
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  14. Writing a driver for Android Things: BME280 Humidity sensor

    In this article we're going to investigate how to write a device driver for Android Things. In particular, we're going to extend the functionality offered in Google's contrib driver package for the BMX280 temperature and ambient pressure to allow for humidity measurements as well. We're also going to modify the…
    on Android Things - Comments

  15. A look at ConstraintLayout

    Constraint Layout is a new layout system that allows devs to create perfectly flat (not nested) layouts. Think of it as RelativeLayout on steroids. The developer specifies the position of each component relative to the edges of the other siblings or parent (e.g. the top of this TextView aligns…
    on Android ConstraintLayout SupportLibrary - Comments