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
A Row is a widget used to display child widgets in a horizontal manner. When children are placed within the Row then the widget will not allow scroll features to view all children — it will simply display the children that are visible within view. For example, if we wished to display three text widgets within a… Continue reading
Emojis are everywhere — it’s hard to visit a website, app or have a conversation without emojis popping up somewhere along the line ? Because of this, it’s important that all users who are involved in these kind of activities are able to see the emojis being used. If not, textual content can be misunderstood or misinterpreted…. Continue reading
Last week came the official announcement of the Android O release. This release of Android comes with some really cool new additions, and in this post I want to look specifically at the new restrictions that have been introduced for background services. If you’re using background services in your app then changes could affect your… Continue reading
Now the Android O APIs have finalised, Android O is just around the corner — which means we need to be sure our apps are filled with the latest goodies from the API. In this article we’re going to be taking a look at one of my favourite Android O features: Notification Badges ? I feel like… Continue reading
What an I/O! There were so many exciting things announced this year and too much that I want to write about! One of the topics that I (and a lot of other people) were hyped for was on Architecture. From these talks Architecture Components was announced, and after playing with them since, I’m taking this… Continue reading