Kiran Kuppa's List: Android

A categorized collection of various android utilities and libraries.

"Ever wondered about Google play store UI which is built around cards. Card is nothing but a single row item of ListView or GridView. As depicted below, card can be of various sizes and can be either app card, movie, books, games or app suggestions card or birthday card or even it can be a simple list/grid item too.

The main benefit of designing app with card UI is it gives consistent looks throughout the application, doesn’t matter whether it gets loaded in mobile or tablet."

With an odexed ROM, you'll find files which end with .odex within the system app folders. This stands for ''Optimized Dalvik Executable File''. Browser.apk and browser.odex will appear in the /system/app folder as well.When it comes to a deodexed ROM, all of the application information is found in an .apk file. The code found in the .odex files are added to the apk under the name classes.dex.

This site hosts a library for Near Field Communication on Android using the NDEF format.. In particular the site provides an eclipse plugin for the developers to create NDef records for various use cases - URI, Smartposter, Event etc. There is also an associated application hosted on Google Play store which is very useful in composing complex NDEF records and burning on Tags

"Fragmentation matters to the entire Android community: users, developers, OEMs, brands & networks. It's a blessing and a curse.

The Blessing. Fragmentation allows users to take their pick from thousands of devices. You can choose from phones with 3D screens, projectors, CDMA, GSM, or even CDMA & GSM. You may not care that Tag Heuer has made an Android phone but at least one person does (and they use OpenSignalMaps). It's a triumph for Android that as a single OS it can target so many markets.

The Curse. The proliferation of devices with their associated screen sizes, internal hardware and custom ROMs creates some difficulties. We spend a lot of time making the app presentable (or at less functional) on exotic devices - this is the most common request we get from app users"

The other big security enhancement introduced in Android 4.3 is a more robust way to store cryptographic credentials used to access sensitive information and resources. This means changes to the Android KeyChain, which stores digital certificates used to access Wi-Fi networks and virtual private networks used by large corporations and government agencies.

With the keychain enhancements, the system-wide keys are bound to a hardware-based root of trust process devices that support this.The phone needs to have a secure element such as a Trusted Platform Module so that private keys can't be stolen even if the phone is rooted and the attacker has full access to the operating system. Phones that don't have this hardware capability will fall back to software protections for securing credentials.Enhancements to the Android Keystore, a similar resource that also stores credentials, allows users to create keys that can be accessed and used exclusively by a single application. Under version 4.3, "apps can create or store private keys that cannot be seen or used by other apps and can be added to the keystore without any user interaction

A third enhancement is Android's ability to create secondary user profiles that implement fine-grained restrictions.

" I will walk through the 4 kinds of Relative Layout use cases.

1.Target view position in relation to parenting View Group (i.e. a layout container)
2.Target view alignment in relation to parenting View Group
3.Target view position in relation to another View
4.Target view alignment in relation to another View
We’ll use Jack and Jill buttons to demonstrate this. The first two categories are in relation to a parent layout (Jack and the parent view group). The last two categories show laying out in relation to another View (i.e. Jack + Jill)"

Holo Everywhere is an android library /extension to be able to use Holo theme on older android devices as well 

The <merge /> was created for the purpose of optimizing Android layouts by reducing the number of levels in view trees.When the LayoutInflater encounters this tag, it skips it and adds the <merge /> children to the <merge /> parent.You can also use <merge /> when you create a custom composite view. 

Using Java annotations, developers can show their intent and let AndroidAnnotations generate the plumbing code at compile time.
Few Features are

• Dependency injection: inject views, extras, system services, resources, ...
• Simplified threading model: annotate your methods so that they execute on the UI thread or on a background thread.
• Event binding: annotate methods to handle events on views, no more ugly anonymous listener classes!
• REST client: create a client interface, AndroidAnnotations generates the implementation.
• AndroidAnnotations provide those good things and even more for less than 50kb, without any runtime perf impact!

"First off, the difference between android:gravity and android:layout_gravity is that android:gravity positions the contents of that view (i.e. what’s inside the view), whereas android:layout_gravity positions the view with respect to its parent (i.e. what the view is contained in). "

"Ice Cream Sandwich (ICS) sports two new widgets that have been designed to support the richer user interfaces made possible by larger displays: Space and GridLayout."

"This library provides a version of GridLayout that works across all versions of Android 1.5+. As a side effect, this library also includes the lightweight Space as well."

Arguably the worst part in playing around with Android is its insistence to put that ugly title bar above everything I do as a default to Activities. Thankfully, the framework allows one to change this behavior.This post is going to explore the ways in which we can create custom title bars and more importantly just how far we can push the limits.

Using the Eclipse GUI does not allow one to easily: (a) Add custom build steps (b) Use an automated build system (c) Use build configurations (d) Build the release project with one command.Fortunately, the Android SDK comes equipped with support for Ant.This tutorial will show you how to incorporate an Ant build script into your Android projects,even if you still develop with Eclipse.

"A collection of useful, open source applications that demonstrate basic features of the Android platform."

"It turns out that familiarity with web UI development, particularly using modern HTML5 techniques, can be a great primer for Android UI development. The Android framework and SDK have many analogues to tools and techniques in the Web repertoire of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.

In this blog post, we'll walk through a few web development features and look for matches in the world of Android UI development."

Building quality Android apps and getting good reviews depends on your ability to know, understand and fix bugs when your users experience them. Acra catches exceptions, retrieves lots of context data and send them to a Google Spreadsheet... or whatever backend you prefer.Best of all, it is FREE and OPEN SOURCE.

ActionBarSherlock is an extension of the support library designed to facilitate the use of the action bar design pattern across all versions of Android with a single API.The library will automatically use the native action bar when appropriate or will automatically wrap a custom implementation around your layouts. This allows you to easily develop an application with an action bar for every version of Android from 2.x and up.

" In the latest Android Design in Action Roman Nurik (watch in YouTube) did a great roundup of UI design patterns that have not yet made their way to the official guidelines but are starting to appear in apps more frequently"