androidresearch

[androidresearch]

An introduction to Android's App Shortcuts

An introduction to Android’s App Shortcuts

Android Nougat 7.1, the newest version of Android at the time of writing this article, comes with several new features.  The one that we will be exploring in this blog post is the App Shortcuts feature. App Shortcuts allows you to create shortcuts for specific actions within your app that can bring users directly from the launcher to the associated screens. The feature is available on any…

[androidresearch]

Android BottomNavigationView Example

The 25th version of Android Support Library brings an implementation of the Bottom navigation pattern called BottomNavigationView – a navigation bar intended to make it easy to switch between top level views with a single tap. In order to benefit from this new addition, the design support library needs to be updated to API Level 25.0.0: dependencies { compile 'com.android.support:design:25.0.0'…

[androidresearch]

Java 8 Language features supported in Android N: Lambdas

Java 8 Language features supported in Android N: Lambdas

One of the new additions the Android N brings is support for several Java 8 language features: – Lambda expressions – Default and static interface methods, and – Repeatable annotations In this blog post we will take a look at the lambda expressions. Setting up development environment In order to start using these features however, the development environment needs some adjustments. The support of…

[androidresearch]

Open sourcing Explore

Explore is a simple app I wrote in my free time some time ago. The idea behind it is to help you find a place you would like to visit (eg.: country or city), by searching for information about that place in different sources and then making a summary of this information and presenting it to you. More specifically, it searches for information in the following sources: Youtube for videos Flickr for…

[androidresearch]

An Introduction to Espresso

An Introduction to Espresso

Espresso is a testing framework that exposes a set of APIs to perform UI testing of android apps. With the latest 2.0 release, Espresso is now part of the Android Support Repository which makes it more easier to add automated testing support for your project.

But before jumping into Espresso API, lets consider what puts it apart from the other testing frameworks.

One of the first things you’ll…

[androidresearch]

Example usage of AppCompatActivity in Android

The latest release of android support library, 22.1, deprecates the ActionBarActivity in favor of AppCompatActivity, which promises to bring a single consistent ActionBar for all devices starting with API Level 7 and above. Also, the new update adds the ability to tint widgets automatically when using AppCompat, and adds support for consistent material design dialogs. Use support.v7.app.AlertDial…

[androidresearch]

Introducing SectionedActionBarList

This Android library allows you to replace the drop down navigation list with a custom list where the items in the list are grouped by sections. It was inspired from the Google I/O 2014 app how sessions are grouped in the ActionBar list.

While the new Material Design movement discourages the use of ActionBar lists, in some situations it can be the best available option.

At the moment it is not…

[androidresearch]

Speed up creation of parcelable classes with AutoParcel

When the time comes to send a custom object to an activity or to persist it across configuration changes, we all know that we can use either Serializable or Parcelable interfaces. And probably you have heard that Parcelable is the recommended way to do it on Android, because it is much much faster than Serializable (10x times and more, check this article for a detailed comparition between…

[androidresearch]

Analysing Android code with SonarQube

Analysing Android code with SonarQube

SonarQube, formerly known as Sonar, is a platform to analyze code quality. Analysis covers such aspects as code duplications, potential bugs, coding rules, complexity, unit tests, comments, and architecture & design. It supports supports more than 20 programming languages and has a reach set of useful plugins that gives you the opportunity to inspect different aspects of the code.

What is…

[androidresearch]

Introducing Photo Collage Creator

Introducing Photo Collage Creator

I was playing with bitmap manipulations and so was born the idea to make this app. It was started some time ago, and, even if at times I was thinking it will never see the daylight, finally it was released!

Description of the app: Photo Collage Creator is a simple app that lets you create beautiful collages within seconds and share them with your family, friends or colleagues. To create a collage…

[androidresearch]

Android Volley Tutorial

Volley is an android library released by Google that can make your life easier when dealing with network operations. In this blog post I will mention the main features of the library and show a few example usages, in particular, how to make a request, how…

View Post

[androidresearch]

2013 in review

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2013 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an…

View Post

[androidresearch]

I got interviewed by Android Dream Revised blog

Past week I gave an interview for Android Dream Revised blog. Bartek, the author of the blog, is an android developer who is making Android apps as a hobby. Periodically he interviews different android indie developers that share their experience and…

View Post

[androidresearch]

Google Maps API V2 Android Tutorial

In this tutorial we will walk through the process of integrating Google Maps API V2 into an Android…

View Post

[androidresearch]

ViewPager with Tabs inside SlidingMenu

This started as a question on StackOverflow on how to have tabs inside the SlidingMenu.

Though I…

View Post

[androidresearch]

Your Google Play Publisher Console has been terminated, because of Copyright infringiment.

This morning I found an email in my inbox that looked like this: The first impression was like…

View Post

[androidresearch]

Example using ViewPager with ActionBarSherlock tabs

In this post I’m going to show you an example usage of ViewPager in conjunction with ActionBarSherl…

View Post