There were a ton of exciting things announced at I/O this year — one of the things that caught my eyes the most was the new app bundle format. Not only does this format provide a new upload format for our applications, but it will help to influence how we build and structure our applications in a… Continue reading
Exposing Notification Settings to the Android System
Have you ever looked at the Android System settings page for a specific application and wondered about the option to view “Additional settings in the app”? If you haven’t seen this before in your settings, or aren’t aware of it, this is what it looks like: This option allows developers to essentially provide a link… Continue reading
Exploring Image Keyboard Support on Android
During a recent hack day we added a bunch of small but impactful features into our application, one of these being integration with the GIF input provided by the Google keyboard. This involved us making use of the Image Keyboard Support (IKS) functionality that was introduced in Android 7.1 (API level 25), this allows us… Continue reading
Building HashTrack with Flutter: Intro and setup
Welcome to the first post of this little series that I’m going to be publishing ~ every week from now. In this collection of posts I want to run you through creating a simple app with Flutter. Within this series we’ll be creating an application that allows us to track a collection of hashtags for… Continue reading
Exploring Firebase Authentication on iOS
Firebase provides an extensive suite of tools that helps us to both make app development simpler and also provide us with some powerful features to analyse and improve the experience for our users. Within this suite we will find Firebase Authentication, which is a tool providing our users with the ability to sign-up and sign-in… Continue reading
Modularizing Android Applications
We’ve all been there. Single module android applications — at some point in our Android development career it’s likely we’ve worked on, or are working on, a project that consists of a single module. Now, there’s nothing wrong with that at all and in a lot of cases, a single module will most likely do the job…. Continue reading
Exploring Firebase MLKit on Android: Landmark Detection (Part Four)
At Google I/O this year we saw the introduction of Firebase MLKit, a part of the Firebase suite that intends to give our apps the ability to support intelligent features with more ease. With this comes the landmark recognition feature, giving us the ability to detect known landmarks within an input feed so that we… Continue reading
Exploring Android on Chrome OS: Optimising keyboard navigation
Recently I managed to get my hands on a Pixelbook. If you haven’t got one, or even read to much into them, then you’ll be excited to know that they have the ability to run Android applications on them. That means that if you have an application in the Play Store, anyone on Chrome OS… Continue reading
Authenticating users with Firebase and Flutter
When it comes to building apps, it’s likely that you’re going to want to perform some sort of user authentication, data storage or some other related tasks. Luckily for us, there are a collection of tools available from Firebase that allow us to achieve such things — some of these tools are also available for use with… Continue reading
Exploring Android P: Magnifier
At Google I/O there were a lot of new announcements around the latest version of Android, P. One of these announcements was the new Magnifier functionality—a feature that will make it easier to view and select content that the magnifier is currently being shown for. In this article we’re going to take a quick dive… Continue reading