Archive
Canvas drawing in Android can be an enormous topic to grasp, so setting yourself small achievable (albeit not practically useful) goals can be a great way to isolate things that you're missing. Hence, this article will demonstrate how to draw and animate a simple countdown timer.
As far as language features go, collections are a basic necessity in Java. You can add, remove and retrieve elements, but it has always frustrated me that more complex operations, like filtering or mapping, require lines of grotesque boilerplate code with iterators. A library that you may already be using can help. It's called Guava. Before I go any further, I should mention that none of these problems exist in Java 8 with its shiny streams. Hence, this guide is only for the developers stuck in the yesteryear, because of either Android or some unupdatable legacy system.
App design can be evaluated on various merits: ease of use, brand adherence, even simple attractiveness. What often gets ignored is the platform consistency — iOS designs being ported to Android with zero changes.
Storing an image inside of a model is as common as can be, however if that picture can take on local and remote guises, you may find yourself repeating the same conditional statements each time you display it, thus cluttering up your view logic. This article will describe a possible solution using a DrawableSource pattern relying on the "never return null" principle.
Many articles have been written on code coverage since the feature was introduced to Android in vesion 0.10.0 of the Gradle plugin — I have no illusions about that. However, what frustrates me is having to look through several of them and even some Gradle documentation before you can get a full working solution. So here goes another article in an attempt to remedy that and save you time.
It was only a matter of time before version 2.0 of the well-known dependency injection library Dagger hit production and that seemed like a good reason to write an article about it. But first we'll spend some time looking at the original Dagger.
Well, not quite but let's start from the beginning.
If you are an Android developer, you must have heard about the "new build system" by now, comprising of Gradle and a plugin to go with it, regardless of whether or not you have tried it.
This year's Tiobe Index is out — an annual report gathered by the Dutch company TIOBE Software to measure the popularity of the major programming languages around the world — and this one packs a few headline-worthy stats.
Exactly a week after the event, I finally have some time to cover the One More Thing 2012 conference that I was lucky enough to check out down in Melbourne last Saturday. Unfortunately, I could only catch the main conference on Saturday (May 26) therefore missing the mini-conferences on Friday, but oh well. Jump past the break for the full story.