At Google I/O 2019, Google announced that they were working on a new toolkit, Jetpack Compose, which would redesign how user interfaces (UI) are developed on the Android platform. In August 2020, the alpha version of Jetpack Compose was released. In this post, I will be examining how Compose differs from the current Android UI toolkits, and will discuss the benefits that the new program will bring to Android UI development.
Creating a successful application isn’t just about ensuring that all of the components work; the layout and design of the application are also crucial. The design must be professional and engaging, and the layout should be easy for users to navigate. Design components, such as animations and navigation transitions, can also enhance the usability of the application.
Concurrency is not something that most people think about on a daily basis; however, it benefits most of us throughout our day. Whenever we ask our technological devices to perform multiple tasks, either within one application or across multiple applications, our device is using concurrency to make it happen. Thanks to concurrent programming, our devices are able to multitask at the same rate that we do.
Your company needs a mobile app and you want to save money (of course). You want the app live last week, and you’d really like to avoid hiring Android and iOS devs on top of your existing web team.
In light of these considerations, going the hybrid route looks like a pretty good option. Hybrid mobile apps promise to be cheaper and faster to develop, and they’re built with tried and true technologies like Javascript, HTML, and CSS. The hybrid sales pitch can be summarized as “one codebase for multiple platforms”. Hybrid platforms include React Native, PhoneGap, Ionic, Titanium, and others.
Kotlin is a JVM language that hit version 1.0 about a year ago (February 2016).
It is developed by JetBrains, the same people who make my favorite suite of
IDEs. The language itself is open-source under the Apache License 2.0 and is
developed as a community project over at kotlinlang.org. Kotlin is something
that I have become rather excited about over the past year. This post’s goal is
not to teach you Kotlin but to get you excited about it!
Working as developers, we are focused on the low level technical details of a product, being that a website or an app. This heads down approach often makes us not to pay attention to many high level details that are crucial to bring our product to success. The typical path for a developer, at least at the beginning, is to build an app, put it on the store and then see it fail miserably. If that has happened to your app, then this post is for you!
Howdy, lazy bum! Enjoying the ReactiveX magic? Want to take a look at polling?
I’ll be walking you through a solution I put together for one of our up and coming apps! It works rather well, I learned a lot, and so far no complaints…although there are no users yet either!
Feeling quite charitable, I’m going to let you in on some useful bits and pieces as we build up to polling: threading, late subscribing, replay, manual re-triggering and error handling (a must for preserving replays).
I work from all over the place: Home, on public transit, the office, coffee shops, etc.
A big challenge to developing android apps in an environment where my laptop and phone are on different networks (wifi vs. LTE, or laptop tethered through phone) is the inability for my phone to see the API server that is often running locally on my laptop. Here is a simple tip to allow your phone to hit the backend over ADB and a usb cable.
For years developers (and consequently consumers), have had to accept the fact that the Tablets (and some phones) would always have the System/Navigation Bar visible on their screens. A 10.1 inch advertised screens, offered in fact a 9.8 inch usable screen.
Finally Google’s latest Android OS, KitKat, introduces a decent user-friendly tool that gives us ownership of that last bit of screen.
