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. The SDK currently comes with a collection of pre-defined capabilities that are commonly required in applications — you’ll be able to implement these in… Continue reading
Version 28 of the Android support library was recently announced — within the current alpha version there is a collection of exciting new components that we now have access to. In this article, I want to take a look at the additions which have been made to the Support library in the form of Material view components…. Continue reading
A few weeks or so ago the first developer preview of Android P was made available to us. Along with this announcement we were introduced to a number of new features and APIs made available to us in this release of Android. Whilst it is still early days (and there are likely new things /… Continue reading
A few days ago the first developer preview of Android P was made available to us. Along with this announcement we were introduced to a number of new features and APIs made available to us in this release of Android. Whilst it is still early days (and there are likely new things / changes to… 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
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
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
The RaisedButton widget allows us to create a Button that matches the specification defined in the Material Guidelines here. The RaisedButton has a single constructor that allows us to instantiate the widget with a number of different properties. new RaisedButton( child: const Text(‘Connect with Twitter’), color: Theme.of(context).accentColor, elevation: 4.0, splashColor: Colors.blueGrey, onPressed: () { //… Continue reading