Google recently announced the launch of Android Instant Apps, a new technology which allows just the bare minumum of an App to be downloaded from links, bypassing the Play Store. This sounds cool enough on its own, but the implications of this reach far deeper than at first appears, and could end up changing the entire internet.
RED Hydrogen One
- Carl Whalley 0 Comments
The $1200 Android handset (and that's the budget version)
Known for their high-end cameras which totally disrupted the film industry, RED are hoping to do the same to the world of mobile with an incredibly ambitious new smartphone - and a price tag to match.
The device comes in two versions - a titanium shell enclosed one at just $1600, or a regular aluminium one at $1200, and the website says those prices are for a limited time only. Both have a 5.7" “Hydrogen holographic display” which promises to let you see holographic RED Hydrogen 4-View content, 3D content, and 2D/3D virtual reality and augmented reality content. No glasses or headsets are required - this breakthrough has been achived using nanotechnology tech and super smart software. It's not just the display which is special either - the audio is touted as "multi-dimensional", using a proprietary H3O algorithm giving "5.1 on your headphones".
Shape Shifter - SVG Icon animations
- Carl Whalley 0 Comments
Android SVG graphics made easy with a cool web app
Alex Lockwood has worked Roman Nurik's Android Icon Animator into a single web app. Anyone who's ever tried to work with SVG graphics will appreciate the way an interactive timeline-based tool completely changes the game. No longer are you working with awkward single frame images comprising of nothing but tons of raw numbers. Now, it's as easy as dropping the start and end images on the timeline and watching the animation morph in front of your eyes!
Being web-based, nothing needs to be installed. The tool is super smart too, meaning it can analyze the images for inconsistencies and offer to "auto fix" them for you.
Animated icons are the next bing thing in home screen navigation, and with SVG they scale perfectly to any resolution.
Simple or complex - the choice is down to the user, because the tool features layers onto which each image can be independently morphed. By running all the layers together, a complex suite can be built up and then exported with the click of a mouse.
It's what SVG animation has been waiting for! Head over now any try this out for yourself...
Andy Rubin's Essential new Android phone
- Carl Whalley 0 Comments
He's fathered a new Android
What do you do once you've revolutionised mobile by creating an operating system used by 4 out of every 5 smartphones on the planet?
Best known as the guy who made Android via his startup bought out by Google in the mid 2000's, Andy Rubin is back - and he's got something Essential to show you. He's launched not only a new Android smartphone, but also smart home device to rival the Amazon Echo/Google Home etc, plus a totally new OS called "Ambient".
The name of the new company behind all this is "Essential", and this time he's unashamedly got his sights on "fixing" the problems todays smart technology ecosystem faces.
Using ConstraintLayout to create beautiful animations
- Jinyan Cao 0 Comments
Minimal coding required
ConstraintLayout seems to be the hot new thing nowadays. Flattening your view hierarchy, improving performance, supporting arbitrary bounding rules — it promises to fix all of the shortcomings of some previous layout files (*cough* I’m looking at you RelativeLayout *cough*) and more. But there is one other benefit of ConstraintLayout that most people are unaware of and the official documentation curiously doesn’t mention anything about: performing cool animations on your ConstraintLayout views with very little code.
How?
I’m going to assume that you know the basics of ConstraintLayout (e.g. you know what is app:layout_constraintLeft_toLeftOf and its relatives). Most of the tutorials on ConstraintLayout focus on using the newly improved Android Studio layout design panel where you can drag/drop/visualize the various constraints. For the purposes of animations, it’s also good to take a peek at the generated XML to get a better understanding of the various constraint attributes so you know how to manipulate them.
Using Gradle Script Kotlin for Android
- Arturo Gutiérrez 0 Comments
Yup - use Kotlin in Gradle Script
As you know, we use Groovy to write our Gradle build scripts and it has pros and cons. Groovy is a dynamic language which means that it’s not statically typed, making difficult to write or modify our gradle scripts without making many mistakes as we don’t have autocomplete there.
Last year, Gradle decided to start using Kotlin to writing Gradle build scripts creating, what they call, Gradle Kotlin Script. The project is moving fast (0.9.0 version at the time of writing this article) but, on the other hand, there is practically no documentation.
So, I want to show you how to use Gradle Kotlin Script to create Gradle build scripts written in Kotlin in one Android project.
Android Treble: Finally speedy updates for all?
- Bill Damage 0 Comments
A thorn in Android's side for years
Ask anyone familiar with Android today what the biggest problem with it is and chances are "security" and "updates" will feature prominently in the answers. It's no co-incidence either - the two are intricately related.
In the eyes of the public, Android is less secure because it doesn't get updates anything like as quickly or as comprehensively as other platforms, in particular the iPhone. Even worse, some handsets end up getting no updates at all after a shockingly short length of time from their launch. Two years from launch until sunset has even been seen, without naming names.
Vendors prefer to sell new models for obvious reasons. There's no money for them in providing eternal updates, and it costs a fortune to retro-fit them in anyway, money which they''d much sooner invest in their newer models.
Will Android Things do for the IoT what Android did for mobile?
- Carl Whalley 0 Comments
My first 24 hours with Android Things
Just when I was in the middle of an Android based IoT commercial project running on a Raspberry Pi 3, something awesome happened. Google released the first preview of Android Things, their SDK targeted specifically at (initially) 3 SBC’s (Single Board Computers) — the Pi 3, the Intel Edison and the NXP Pico. To say I was struggling is a bit of an understatement — without even an established port of Android to the Pi, we were at the mercy of the various quirks and omissions of the well-meaning but problematic homebrew distro brigade. One of these problems was a deal breaker too — no touchscreen support, not even for the official one sold by Element14. I had an idea Android was heading for the Pi already, and earlier a mention in a commit to the AOSP project from Google got everyone excited for a while. So when, on 12th Dec 2016, without much fanfare I might add, Google announced “Android Things” plus a downloadable SDK, I dived in with both hands, a map and a flashlight, and hung a “do not disturb” sign on my door
Kotlin is now official on Android
- Carl Whalley 0 Comments
First class support throughout
Hardcore Android developers have been aware Koltin could be used alongside Java for some time, but many have been held back by the lack of official support. That ended at Google I/O 2017, when it was announced it will now be fuly supported from Android Studio 3.0 onwards, and that's right through from the IDE syntax checkers to the Gradle build system and beyond.
How has Kotlin been implemented on Android?
Since Android is powered at it's heart by a JVM, that's Java Virtual Machine, in theory, anything which can create the bytecode it expects can be used to run software on it. Koltin is such a beast, and AS 3.0 now has the toolchain needed to generate it. So it's a hat tip to the designers of the original JVM for creating a system with such longevity.
Uniquely, Kotlin is not an "all or nothing" swap in for Java, the way other languages would be (or at least not without a few very complicated hoops to jump through). It actually sits side by side in the source tree and is even interoperable with Java, so it can call Java methods directly and vice-versa. Migrating existing projects over just lost what is traditionally the largest hurdle they face.
Android fingerprint authentication
- Josias Sena 0 Comments
Place your fingertip on the fingerprint reader
There are a number of ways to authenticate a user to access an application, or a certain feature within an application, such as checkout, and fingerprint is one of them. For this post instead of going through the code step by step, i have added in-code comments, and will be letting the code speak for itself.
First things first, the permission.
The good thing is that we do not need to ask for this permission at runtime.
This project only has one activity, the MainActivity. Lets take a look at the code.
