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 strings in the strings.xml file? Or want to see things in the Design View but it’s supposed to be hidden in the real view?

You can use the nifty tools namespace to make things visible for design purposes but have no affect in your app. Add the tools namespace to your XML file and you can override things such as visibility and text. Even though android:visibility is set to gone, using tools:visibility to visible, the view will be visible in the Design View but not in the real implementation.Very handy for complex layouts.

https://gist.github.com/spongebobrf/fd3199c043e02e399b5c

http://tools.android.com/tips/layout-designtime-attributes

• Development Tools:
  • Vysor Beta Chrome Extension – View and control your Android from your computer – https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/vysor-beta/gidgenkbbabolejbgbpnhbimgjbffefm
  • ADB Wifi – Remote deploying of apps to your devices over WiFi – https://plugins.jetbrains.com/plugin/7856?pr=idea
  • SDK Search – View android source code in Chrome https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/android-sdk-search/hgcbffeicehlpmgmnhnkjbjoldkfhoin?hl=en
• Github Libraries & Projects:
  • Plaid – Great open source application that has some awesome material motion examples. https://github.com/nickbutcher/plaid
  • MaterialIntroTutorial – This might be a bit biased because it’s made by me 😁https://github.com/spongebobrf/MaterialIntroTutorial   #ShamelessPlug
  • A better way to do dates in Java – ThreeTenABP  https://github.com/JakeWharton/ThreeTenABP

What cool Android things have you discovered recently?

#AndroidMorsels