Posts on Android Essence

“If you don’t learn how to use AI, you’re going to be left behind.”

A properly relational database may have a type that appears referenced multiple times.

Ten years ago today, I published my first blog post.

Shared Element Transitions are a fantastic way to add visual flair to your applications.

Recently I’ve been finding myself immersed in Compose Multiplatform, a way to build cross platform mobile applications with Jetpack Compose UI.

Many engineers will tell you that one of the most complicated responsibilities of our job is naming things.

Dependency Injection is one of the hottest topics in Android and software development in general.

In the most recent live stream for Tasks Of Affirmation, we looked at creating a good developer experience.

In the late summer of 2020, I began live streaming on my Twitch channel.

In our previous post we looked at writing a custom lint check to enforce usages of a custom view instead of an Android framework implementation.

Sometimes an Android project will have to implement a custom view that is an extension of an existing Android view.

In our previous post we looked at the HTTP cache from Apollo Android for storing network responses.

Caching is the practice of storing data that we requested previously so we can serve it faster in the future.

During a recent live stream on my Twitch channel, we explored three different solutions to dependency injection on Android.

In the last post, we demonstrated the different types of database relationships in Room.

In this post, we’re going to explore some advanced concepts of the Room Persistence Library.

One of the many buzzwords thrown around the software devleopment community is Test Driven Development, or TDD.

The Kotlin language used by Android developers all over the world is open source and available on GitHub.

As an Android developer, one of the questions I constantly see asked within the community is “what architecture pattern should I use?”

How to properly architect your application is a concern we as developers constantly face.

Putting aside the long lasting debate right now about whether you should use RxJava or coroutines for your asynchronous code on Android, both camps often hit the same problem.

A number of developers preach a single activity architecture on Android, which is something I’ve been trying to move forward to as well.

This is the second post in what will be an ongoing series to demonstrate a few different architecture patterns that are used for Android development.

This is the first post in what will be an ongoing series to demonstrate a few different architecture patterns that are used for Android development.

So far we’ve covered four big buzzwords used in our application: Model-View-ViewModel Room RxJava Repository Pattern Now, we should circle back to the beginning.

In part 1 we discussed how we were going to architect the various components of our application.

When you’re starting out with Android development, and even as an expert, you will hear about a lot of different architecture patterns.

MVVM?

When Android released version 6.0 Marshmallow (yes, a little outdated at this point), a whole slew of new developer APIs came with it.

Third party libraries are a huge part of mobile app development.

DISCLAIMER: This application no longer exists in Google Play, but the post has been kept for posterity.

Espresso is a testing framework for Android that allows developers to write automated tests for their applications.

Every Java programmer has faced the dreaded NullPointerException at some point in their life.

This year at Google I/O, the Android team announced Android Architecture Components a combination of new, helpful libraries for Android development.

If you’ve been following along with parts 1-3, you now have an (almost) working todo list application.

Following parts 1 and 2 you should have a working Android app in Kotlin that displays a list of Tasks to be completed and lets you mark them as complete.

Following up on part 2 which demonstrates how to create your Android app and configure Kotlin, we’ll begin building the heart and soul of a Todo List application - the list!

This blog post is going to discuss creating a project from scratch in Kotlin.

It is tough enough maintaing your app by updating the support library version numbers every time a new version is out, let alone factoring in any other third party libraries you may use.

Android app shortcuts are a special feature added in Android 7.1 (API 25).

I was recently asked if there was a way to increase/decrease the font size of a TextView by pinching on it, just as you can with many iamges.

As a new or intermediate Android developer, getting started with Retrofit, a popular HTTP client, can seem pretty daunting.

Recently, I became tired of writing the same old tedious code for every single RecyclerView and Adpater class I used, that all did the same thing, so I extrapolated all of it into a personal library.

Android has a built in SearchView component but it doesn’t feel much like Material Design.

As a form of ultimate procrastination this weekend, I decided to spend the last two days developing a RichTextView library.

User interface for Android Wear have all the same components as a phone’s UI, they just appear a little differently.

Rising in popularity after the latest Google I/O, Android Wear is a game changer for mobile development.

Along with the RecyclerViewCursorAdapter library that was released earlier this week, I have now released my second open source Android library.

Today I released my first library which is for a RecyclerviewCursorAdapter.

After reading part one which discusses what Views and ViewGroups are, as well as how to create them in XML, the next step is to incorporate them into your Android application.