A collection of random tips about the Android SDK from Daniel Lew that you might have overlooked, even for highly experienced developers.
Provides high level, one off examples for all of them as well.
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#Android DevelopmentMore you might like
Null has a lot of issues, and is ever prevalent when doing Android development. A great read on what null is, and strategies on how it can be effectively used.
“If null strings and empty strings mean actively different things, that’s better, but treating them as the same thing is a disturbingly common code smell.”
Very helpful explanation of how FragmentTransactions work, and how to avoid IllegalStateExceptions when using them.
An awesome little library to help perform arc animations in.
Easy screenshots
We take screenshots a lot at Tumblr, and it’s a bit tedious to find the ‘screenshot’ button in Android Studio, save the screenshot, navigate to it, and open it in finder. Here’s an alias that does it all in one step:
alias ss=“adb shell screencap -p | perl -pe ’s/\x0D\x0A/\x0A/g’ > screen.png && open screen.png”
Credit: http://blog.shvetsov.com/2013/02/grab-android-screenshot-to-computer-via.html
Great article from Jake Wharton explaining not only how to use the Palette library with Picasso, but also how to be clever and resourceful when using third-party libraries.
Ever wanted to know how to write your own Gradle plugin for your Android projects? Here’s an example of a plugin that creates some Gradle tasks to manage your applications version numbers.
If you use the Gradle build system (or Android Studio) to build your apps, you can configure several options to sign your packages (e.g. the signing options for Android apps, or signing maven artifacts for upload). You most likely don’t want to check in your signing keys, passwords, usernames, etc. into a public repository (and maybe not even into a private one). So you can define username, …
Some strategies for making signing your applications a bit easier
Android memory management follows a long the lines of lots of other managed memory environments. In a managed memory environment memory is automatically allocated for each new object you create and kept in memory as long as there is a reference to it from a “root”. If there is no longer a reference to it it will be marked as eligible for recollection by the garbage collector. Take a look at the graph below:
An article by @vanillaburritos as a reflection of her experience open-sourcing PermissMe at Tumblr. Give it a read!