Actions on Google is a pretty fascinating platform when it comes to the creation of conversational tools. So far myself I’ve been able to create a couple of small tools that could have the potential to help users out in one way or another. But there’s one thing that’s always been present on my mind — they’ve… Continue reading
Yesterday Google announced android-ktx, which is a set of Kotlin extensions for Android app development. It looks like the aim of the library is to continue with the advantages that kotlin brings to our project — less code, more fun and a simpler to understand project. Now, the library is only in preview so it is likely… Continue reading
Actions on Google is a pretty fascinating platform when it comes to the creation of conversational tools. So far myself I’ve been able to create a couple of small tools that could have the potential to help users out in one way or another. But they always been missing that one important thing, personalisation. Having… Continue reading
In-app billing is a powerful part of the Android framework that allows us to easily monetise our applications with in-app purchases and subscriptions. Google previously provided us with the in-app billing which allows us to implement this within our apps. However, I remember this never being exactly a straightforward task — we’d have to add a InAppBillingService… Continue reading
At the Firebase Summit this week there were several exciting things that were shared with the community — the one that caught my eye the most was Firebase Predictions. This new service allows you to utilise Firebase to predict the behaviour of users in your app, allowing you to provide personalised experiences that can be used to… Continue reading
In this previous post, we look at testing our ViewModel LiveData from the classes used in the Architecture components library. You can check this post out here if you haven’t yet: Today we’re here to talk about how we can write tests for our DAO classes when we’re using Room for our Database layer in… Continue reading
Dialogflow is a powerful tool that allows us to create conversational tools without the complications of needing to handle natural language processing. But before we dive into the platform, it’s important to understand all of the different concepts that tie together to create the conversational agents that we can create. When I started exploring the… Continue reading
The Hero widget allows us to define that two widgets are related, allowing the system to automatically perform transitional animations for us as we navigate between screens. This allows us to provide a greater experience when transporting users through navigational context, making our app both easier and more pleasant to use. As displayed in the… Continue reading
Last week I pushed a fork of the Buffer Android Boilerplate to a public repository — the difference with this fork is that it uses the new architecture components (ViewModels in the presentation layer and Room in the cache layer). If you haven’t seen it yet, you can do so here 👉 But we’re not here to… Continue reading
In the last part of this series, we looked at how we can build a tool for Actions on Google – if you haven’t checked that out yet then it might be worth reading it before continuing this article: In part two, we’re going to be taking a quick look at how we can leverage… Continue reading