Wow, I almost forgot about this part of my blog. I am writing a note after over a year. I could have written a post about it, but I was tinkering with RxJava and found something interesting and made sort of a theory which I am not sure is correct or not. I am not going to explain what Observers and Subscribers do in RxJava. Anyway, here it goes.
»Finally, after more than a year of working with Android, I’m releasing my first Open Source Library for Android. As the title says, the library is named NoCropper. It’s a lightweight library for cropping images. Since it doesn’t use any special features of Android, it is compatible with 11+ version of android (it uses ValueAnimator).
»Instagram recently released a new feature which allows users to upload non-square images. They implemented a new cropper for that which crops the image if it fits in the square. It also has an option where users can use rectangle images with appropriate cropping. It’s really a handy feature to have.
»I have been laying low for a while and have been pretty busy with my new workplace. I have started wokring at Elanic and it’s been a fun ride. I am just starting small before I go writing big posts again. This is a pretty easy concept and every developer should know these little tricks.
»Android just released a new Design Support Library which is very useful to create beautiful designs and animations (with older version compatibility) and that too without writing much boilerplate code.
»I am working on application which requires a database. Android supports SQLite and we have to make do with it. Writing database queries can create a lot of boilerplate code and can be really difficult to debug. I was looking for some sort of ORM library for android. I came around few of them. One of them was GreenDAO. It seemed very promising but I couldn’t manage to get it working after spending couple of days. I decided to give ORMLite a shot. The library is very stable and uses annotations. It was really easy to implement everything so I decided to stick with it.
I have been working on a Notes application for quite some time now. One of the essential notes are checklists. Google Keep has really nice implementation of checklist note. So taking inspiration from the layout, I tried making my own checklist.
»I have started working on a new application and for this I was looking for ways to communicate between Service and Activity. I found out about EventBus. Eventbus is really easy to use and can be used to communicate between any Objects. EventBus communication happens by posting parcelable classes around. I will not beat around the bush much and jump in the vague details.
»Google’s Inbox application has a really nice ListView where user could swipe right to mark the email done and swipe left to snooze the notification. I implemented something very similar to that using ListView and ArrayAdapter.
Every app needs user data and facebook and twitter are the most convinient and used social networks to get the user data from. In our app, we have given the facility for the user to sign up and log in using their facebook or twitter credentials.
»ActionBar is a very important part of Android. We can use it for our advantage. We needed certain customization in the actionbar and to do it easily we just made a desirable layout and changed the style of the actionbar.
»An application must have a good looking UI and to get that we implemented our own custom layout to the listview to show songs in a playlist. Android provides ListView and various adapters which can be attached to it. For our purpose, we are using ArrayAdapter.
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