Within Android Studio 4.0 Canary 1 we can start exploring Jetpack compose, a new way to build the UI for your android applications in a declarative manner. To get started with jetpack compose, there is a great tutorial on the official developer site. In this series of articles I want to dive into each of the… Continue reading
Exploring Jetpack Compose: Button
Important: The contents of this article have been deprecated with newer releases for Jetpack Compose. If you’re looking to learn about the Button composable, please see the guides here. If there are any questions on how to make use of the Button component then please do reach out. Otherwise, I’ll catch you in the next… Continue reading
Exploring Android Leanback: Browse Branding
When it comes to building apps for Android TV, things get pretty different when compared to building apps for phones. The experience completely changes for the user – in both the way that content is consumed and how the device is interacted with. Luckily for us we have the Leanback library from Android Jetpack which… Continue reading
Practical SwiftUI: Onboarding UI
At WWDC this year we saw the announcement for SwiftUI, a new way to build user interfaces for our iOS applications in a declarative manner. Whilst SwiftUI is still in beta and there are likely changes to occur in the syntax, it’s felt worthwhile digging into it to prepare for the future approach for building… Continue reading
Media Store access using openFile() on Android 10
As of Android 10, things have changed slightly with how we access files that are contained outside of our application. This change of behaviour has come from the concept of scoped storage – which aims to improve the privacy of user files, adding more control to how files are accessed within the android system. Even… Continue reading
Using Firebase on Android with Kotlin Coroutines
Whilst recently working on a side project I ran into a situation where I needed to make use of the Android Firebase SDKs. This project of mine uses Kotlin Coroutines for all of the asynchronous task handling, so ideally I wanted to keep any Firebase calls to use the same approach – not only so… Continue reading
Exploring View Binding on Android
When it comes to manipulating our user interfaces within Android applications, there are a couple of approaches that we can take. In these cases, we need to obtain a reference these views in-order to manipulate them in some way. For this, we’ll either use findViewById(), followed by casting the view to the corresponding type. Or… Continue reading
Performing OAuth on Android with Custom Tabs
Whether we’re building third-party clients for existing API services, or working on our own product that communicates with our own API, it’s likely that we might be working with authentication that uses a form of OAuth. This standard of authentication approach is something that we’re bound to use at some point in our careers, but… Continue reading
Adding admob adverts to Flutter applications
In many applications that we build we want to offer some way to monetize the product. Be it through in-app purchases, subscriptions or even advertisements – these all provide a way for developers to monetize their application. We’ve long experienced, or implemented, ads through our Android and iOS applications, and now that we’re building Flutter… Continue reading
Exploring App Actions on Android: What are App Actions?
At Google I/O 2018 we were introduced to App Actions, but it was only at I/O this year that we were given the ability to hook into this functionality within our own apps. In this first part of articles focused on App Actions I want to take a quick look into exactly what they are,… Continue reading