Category: android
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Optimizing Layouts in Android – Reducing Overdraw
You have a great idea and you have launched your application into the wild. Now you hear people complaining how your app is slow and horrible to use. Sad face. One such step to improve the rendering time of your application is to have a look at the GPU Overdraw tool.
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Fixing Memory Leaks in Android – OutOfMemoryError
Memory leaks in Android are quite easy to create. The unsuspecting developer might be making a few memory leaks every days without realising. You probably haven’t noticed them yet or even know that they exist. Until you see an exception like this….
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[HOW TO] Set up Kotlin Source Code & Tests in your Android Apps
After reading a lot of different posts raving about Kotlin, I couldn’t help myself. I had some serious FOMO. In this blog post, I will be looking at getting Kotlin set up in existing Android Apps. What is Kotlin? Kotlin is a statically typed programming language that can be used to write Android Apps. It…
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Automated Testing of SQLite Database Upgrades – Android
As a follow up to my previous post [How to use onUpgrade() correctly in Android], I decided that I should probably add some tests to avoid database upgrade failures in the future. Manually testing database upgrades in Android can be quite a pain and you are bound to miss something, especially if you have had loads of versions…
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Android SQLite Database – How to use onUpgrade() correctly
After reading this blog post (and a few others) on how to use the onUpgrade() method for your Android SQLite Database, I thought I should share my experience about how to correctly upgrade your database. It will also be beneficial to highlight why the final solution listed in that blog post would also fail at some point for some scenarios.…
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Monthly Android Morsels [December 2015]
Tips and Tricks for December 2015: Hyphenation in Android TextView – In API 23, Google introduced hyphenation for TextViews. Hyphenation is the term used for breaking up of words when they can’t fit on one line. There is a whole bunch of technical stuff involved in it and it can differ between languages. To take advantage…
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App Invites in Android – Using Google Services
By leveraging the power of Google Services, we can easily send invites to our friends to start using an app we really like. No need to implement custom solutions as this takes care of the typical use case for getting more people into your app. Best of all? It is really simple to implement!
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Book Dash Android App
I have been working on this app for a couple of months and I am SOOO excited to share it with everyone. The app that I have made is for a NPO called Book Dash. Their cause has inspired me and I decided I wanted to make an app for them that would showcase their…
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Monthly Android Morsels [November 2015]
Just a small list of things related to Android development that I have found useful this month. Hope you find them useful too! Android Design: A nice new way to edit your theme and see its effect in Android Studio. Click Tools -> Android -> Theme Editor Android XML optimisation: Tired of creating dummy text…
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[Github Library] Android Material Info Tutorial
I made a Github library to create an on-boarding activity for your Android application. It is inspired by the tutorial in the Google Sheets app. The library offers the ability to set a different background colour per slide. It transitions the colours into one another by calculating the colour between the one it’s transitioning to and where it is…