Five tips to get your code base in shape
Are you living the dream? Is your code so clean it makes your eyes just tear a little? Can’t think of anything you would still like to refactor? Never have any bugs? Using all the latest technologies?
Articles
Expanding target API level requirements in 2019
In a previous blog we described how API behavior changes advance the security and privacy protections of Android, and include user experience improvements that prevent apps from accidentally overusing resources like battery and memory.
Hands-on with Material Components for Android: Bottom App Bar
The Bottom App Bar is an evolution of the traditional Top App Bar (a.k.a Toolbar or ActionBar in the Android world) which, one might argue, was the defining component of v1 of the Material Guidelines. The Bottom App Bar maintains the core features of an App Bar while offering a fresh look and functional improvements in key areas.
The state of Jetification in early 2019 (plus a bonus Gradle plugin)
In May 2018, Google announced Android Jetpack / AndroidX — a collection of libraries which is meant to be the successor of the Support Library. Along with the AndroidX components, the tool named Jetifier was released. The goal of the Jetifier is to migrate your application’s dependencies and transitive dependencies to AndroidX preventing clashes between two different, but similar library groups. In other words, after running Jetifier during the build time, your project and your dependencies should be 100% migrated to AndroidX. In most cases, Jetifier is used during Gradle builds, though the standalone version is also available.
How Kotlin helps you avoid memory leaks
Last week I gave a talk at MobOS about writing and automating performance tests in Android. As part of the talk I wanted to demonstrate how you could detect memory leaks during your integration tests. To prove that I created an Activity using Kotlin that was supposed to leak memory but for some reason it didn’t. Was Kotlin helping me out without me knowing it?
Libraries
NextFaze/dev-fun
Annotation based developer targeted library. Call any function from anywhere from a nice UI or web interface.
Videos/Podcasts
153: How to be an indie Android developer with Chris Lacy
Listen to all star Indie developer and friend of the show Chris Lacy. Chris Lacy created the beloved Action Launcher – arguably one of the best Launcher apps on Android. In this epiisode, he talks to us about what it’s like being an indie developer, starting on Action Launcher and of course his newest creation – ActionDash.
Class of the week
ClickableSpan
If an object of this type is attached to the text of a TextView with a movement method of LinkMovementMethod, the affected spans of text can be selected. If selected and clicked, the onClick(View) method will be called.
Beyond Android
Lessons from 6 software rewrite stories
Almost two decades ago, Joel Spolsky excoriated Netscape for rewriting their codebase in his landmark essay Things You Should Never Do. He concluded that a functioning application should never, ever be rewritten from the ground up.