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I noticed a pretty neat UI interaction in Ayah for iOS that I wanted to see if I could replicate in Android.

The desktop-head-unit is used for testing Android Auto apps, typically in conjunction with running on a physical device and then running desktop-head-unit --usb.

Recently, I needed to add a custom marker to a MapLibre map with the upcoming street name, while respecting various rules (supporting RTL, etc).

In Android 16, I noticed that my apps that explicitly tried to show Arabic-Hindi numerals (٠, ١, ٢, ٣, …), were now showing Western numerals (0, 1, 2, 3, …) instead.

When upgrading an app to target Android 15 (targetSdk 35), edge to edge layouts are enabled by default.

Alternative Title: “One cannot simply use string indices from Kotlin in Swift.”

Abdulahi and I gave another talk this year at Droidcon NYC.

Introduction Recently, I spent some time trying to replicate a gesture I liked on iOS1.

Compose on the web has always fascinated me.

My coworker Abdulahi Osoble and I recently gave a talk at Droidcon NYC about how to use a design system to make building Server Driven UI easier.

Not too long ago, I came across Kaushik’s blog post and repo about Kotlin scripting.

At KotlinConf this year, JetBrains announced that Compose for Web will be powered by WebAssembly.

Several people have already written about their journey migrating from Gson to Moshi.

A little over a year ago, I gave a talk about building a PrayerTimes mobile application for iOS and Android using Kotlin Multiplatform some time ago.

In a previous article, I talked about writing profiler-util, a tool I open sourced for visualizing build performance over time for personal projects (it interops the files generated by gradle-profiler and uploads the data to a Google Spreadsheet, along wi…

As an Android code base grows and has increasing code churn, unused resources are very likely to exist.

I gave a talk at The Assembly in Dubai about tips and tricks for productively building mobile applications.

Monitoring Gradle Build Speeds for Smaller Projects Today, there are many great articles and videos about how to optimize Gradle performance for Android builds.

I wanted to write a short post about how to find the reason for a particular version of a dependency to be selected by Gradle.

I gave a talk about building a PrayerTimes mobile application for iOS and Android using Kotlin Multiplatform.

Note - A plethora of excellent articles and talks describing how to write an annotation processor exist - consequently, this blog post will not talk about the details on how to build an annotation processor.

One of the interesting projects I worked on this year was building Careem’s SuperApp.

update - i did a small presentation about this as part of TouchlabShare - you can watch the video here.

TL;DR - adding default interface functions in Kotlin constitutes a source-compatible (but not necessarily a binary-compatible) change.

I gave a talk at KotlinConf 2019 about what we learned sharing code between iOS and Android using Kotlin Multiplatform at Careem.

Today, Google released the first alpha of ViewPager2.

One of the features of the Android emulator that I knew about but never used until recently is snapshots.

Today, it’s likely that most newly written Activitys extend AppCompatActivity.

I gave my second talk at droidcon dubai this year with my coworker, Oubai Abbasi.

as we already know, generics in java are a compile time concept to help enforce type safety. during compilation, type erasure kicks in, resulting in the underlying bytecode being free of any generics information. sometimes, however, we need generics infor…

intro sometime in late december or early january, i decided to write a blog post per month. since it’s january 31st, i figured i should write about something to avoid dropping the ball so early in the year. i introduced one of my friends to rxjava 2 not t…

it’s been a while since i first wrote about Haramain. there have been some pretty massive updates recently that i wanted to briefly write about here. an app for iOS i’ve wanted to release an app for iOS for a long time now, and unfortunately never got aro…

not too long ago, someone pointed me to this blog post about keeping your main thread synchronous. it referenced Ray Ryan’s excellent talk about the matter. the talk and blog post lead me to a set of investigations, which prompted me to write this blog po…

i gave my first talk at droidcon sf this year. the talk was about RTL on Android. check it out if you haven’t already (the slides are here).

seeing that LinearLayout is one of the most often used ViewGroup types in Android development, i wanted to write a little bit about how LinearLayout measures its children (this was also inspired by Sriram’s post about Custom ViewGroups). tldr; (key takeaw…

intellij’s structural search and replace is an amazing feature that can save a lot of time. the value of this feature first hit home in the excellent Android Studio for Experts talk during Android Dev Summit 2015 (excellent video if you haven’t already se…

update - as of 12/31/2015, i’ve re-open sourced the app after the discussion here. today is a very sad day for me, since i have finally decided to close quran android’s source code once and for all. throughout the past few years, i’ve come across several…

i haven’t written in a long time. it’s not that i have nothing to write about (i actually have a set of post ideas written somewhere), but more of just not having the time for writing. just yesterday, after seeing a fellow developer’s new blog based on je…

i’ve recently began using RecyclerView in some of my projects, and one thing that stood out as being broken was that mouse scrolling no longer worked. while this is perhaps only a theoretical issue, it is fairly vexing when developing on an emulator, espe…

one of my favorite sites on the web is haramain recordings. haramain recordings posts the latest prayers from masjid al haram and masjid al nabawi on a daily basis (every fajr, maghrib, and isha salah, along with jum3a khutbas, salat al tarawee7, and more…

today, i was having a discussion with Mostafa Gazar about android animations and his Widgets library, and Lucas Rocha’s probe project came to mind. i decided to experiment and see if i could use probe to automatically add a ripple effect to a set of views…

not too long back, i posted about euro matches. earlier this year, we also pushed saudi matches. it includes a new ui, new features, and so on. saudi matches was done in conjunction with Khalid Sudairy, Bandar Raffah, and Taylor Ling. you can download it…

several months ago, i posted a plugin for searching the quran with alfred. i was playing with launchbar 6 recently, and while trying to figure out whether i want to use alfred or launchbar, i decided to write a plugin for searching the quran, with suggest…

it’s been a long time since my last blog post, but i am hoping to become better about blogging. anyhow, the other day, i found nikola, a python blogging engine. i played with it and thought, “it would be cool to migrate my blog to it.” someone had written…

since ios7 brings such a huge change to the ui of ios, i’ve updated the web interface for quranicaudio.com for the iphone. here are the before/after pictures: this was made a lot easier thanks to ios7 templates. i realize that there is no support for andr…

quran android 2.4.0 should be going live shortly insha’Allah. the most notable changes are tablet support while reading, better images for the s4/htc one, support for multiple sdcards, and various improvements.

the latest project i’ve been working on is matches for android, done in conjunction with khalid al sudairy, batoulapps, bandar raffah, and taylor ling. the app is free and can be downloaded from the google play store here.

another thing i didn’t get a chance to write about earlier is the public beta of qamardeen for android. qamardeen is an application that lets you “taste your islam.” i think the official qamardeen page gives a pretty good explanation of what it is and how…

quran for android has seen many changes before ramadan in bringing up the 2.0 release. i just wanted to highlight some of them here, seeing as though i have blog posts talking about other releases of quran android. what’s new?

tl;dr edition to any egyptian reading this - vote for whoever you think is best for egypt’s future, but in the process, never forget the importance of respect and character in such difficult times. i find these verses particularly relevant to the situation