Android Learnings

Publishing light-weight applications on the Play Store is a good practice every developer should focus on when designing an application. Why? ....

Build Status Glide is a fast and efficient open source media management framework for Android that wraps media decoding, memory and disk caching, and resource pooling into a simple and easy to use interface. Glide supports fetching, decoding, and displaying video stills, images, and animated GIFs. Glide includes a flexible api that allows developers to plug in to almost any network stack. By default Glide uses a custom HttpUrlConnection based stack, but also includes utility libraries plug in to Google's Volley project or Square's OkHttp library instead. Glide's primary focus is on making scrolling any kind of a list of images as smooth and fast as possible, but Glide is also effective for almost any case where you need to fetch, resize, and display a remote image.

By default Overflow menu buttons are disabled in pre honeycomb devices like Gingerbread and Froyo. The above API call enables it.

The Android SDK supports a variety of gestures you can detect, allowing you to tailor the ways in which users interact with your applications. In this tutorial, we will look at the framework that allows developers to add gesture detection to a simple application, working through the process of supporting the fling gesture and outlining how to support other gestures. Once you’ve completed the development for a basic fling function, you’ll be able to add additional gestures to the application yourself.

Jeff is a longtime engineer on the Android Framework team responsible in large part for one of the exciting new features in Android 4.4 KitKat, the Storage Access Framework. Learn about that new feature along with other random Android things that happened to come up in the conversation.

In July 2013 Google announced ActionBarCompat as part of its support library package. This library makes it easy to use the Action Bar that have to support older devices. Many have waited for this to happen ever since the Action Bar was introduced with Honeycomb...

In the previous article we began looking at the new Transition Animations API introduced in KitKat 4.4. In this article we’ll have a look beyond the basics and explore how we can take greater control over things using Scenes...

In this tutorial, I’ll show you how to create a shooter game with limited bullets with the Corona SDK. The objective of the game is to shoot a high amount of targets with only five bullets. During this tutorial, you’ll work with timers, touch controls, and physics. To learn more, read on!...

As I write, it is less than two weeks since Google announced Android 4.4 KitKat. There are quite a few new APIs in this version of Android, and in this series we’ll have a look at the all-new Transition Animations...

I just came back from Devoxx where Chet Haase and I gave a few talks on Android. The slides are now available online: What’s New in Android 4.4 Android Memories Android Performance Tips Flithy Rich Android Clients You can also download the Keynote versions of these presentations if you want to watch the embedded videos...

Now that the Android 4.4 KitKat fanfare is (finally) settling down, it's time to revisit our Getting To Know Android series, where we bring to light the new and awesome changes in Google's newest mobile OS - exposing the big stuff right along with some interface changes you may not have noticed yet....

Kirill Grouchnikov often talks about the design and development of Google Play Android app and lets us see behind the curtain of the most used Android app and how to make it work on all devices. In the AnDevCon Kirill gave a presentation with Marco Paglia "Going Responsive with Google Play". The presentation slides are now available and very much worth taking a look....

In this series we’re learning about Android SDK development from scratch! In this tutorial, we will build a simple user interface layout with a few visual elements.....

Kirill Grouchnikov often talks about the design and development of Google Play Android app and lets us see behind the curtain of the most used Android app and how to make it work on all devices. In the AnDevCon  Kirill gave a presentation with Marco Paglia "Going Responsive with Google Play". The presentation slides are now available and very much worth taking a look

When facing bugs that were related to how we interact with the main thread, I decided to get a closer look at what the main thread really is. This article describes the first part of my journey....

Recently I’ve been doing a lot of work on the new Triggertrap mobile Android app. As part of that work I’ve developed a number of custom UI components. One or two of these could be useful generic widgets and I’ve been keen to share them with others. So with the kind permission of the good folks here at Triggertrap I’m happy to share with you a new UI widget I made call the SeekArc....

There are many reasons to build or not to build a mobile app as part of your broader mobile strategy. For instance, while apps offer a rich user experience, users can’t access them through Google Search like they do websites. Today, we’re announcing a new Google Search capability, app indexing, that will start to make apps more accessible through Google on Android. Let’s say that a user is searching for a movie. With app indexing, Google will begin to include deep links to apps in Android search results. When the user taps on the “Open in app” deep links, the app opens up directly to the movie in question.