Design Library – Part 5

At Google I/O 2015 the Material Design Support Library was announced, and with it creating material apps targeting API levels below API 19 suddenly got a lot easier. In this series we’ll look at taking the RSS Reader app that we used as a basis for the Material series, and re-write it to make full…

Dirty Phrasebook – Part 5

On 1st April 2015 I published a joke app to Google Play named Dirty Phrasebook which is based upon Monty Python’s Dirty Hungarian Phrasebook sketch. I this series of articles we’ll take a look in to the code (which will be open-sourced along with the final article). In this article we’ll continue looking at the…

Ripples – Part 3

Previously in this series we’ve looked at the ripple effect touch feedback which was introduced in the Android-L developer preview, and looked at how we can define ripples, and also integrate them with existing background drawables. In this concluding article we’ll look at styling our ripples.

App UI / UX – Part 5

Previously in this series we’ve looked at improving the ActionBar behaviour of our temperature app, but there’s another annoyance that we can fix by tinkering with the ActionBar: When the user performs a bluetooth device discovery scan there is no visual indication that the scan is in progress, and more importantly when the scan completes.…

ActionBarCompat – Part 5

Previously in this series we have worked through porting the existing ActionBar tutorial code to work with ActionBarCompat and therefore be compatible with Android API 7 and later. In this concluding article of the series we’ll compare the example app on both API 7 and API 18 devices to see the differences in UI that…

ActionBarCompat – Part 3

In the previous article we converted our resources for the code from the previous ActionBar series to use ActionBarCompat. In this article we’ll have a look at the Java code and begin looking at the changes that we need to make it backwardly compatible to API level 7 using ActionBarCompat.

ActionBarCompat – Part 2

In the previous article we began converting the existing project from the Styling Android series on ActionBar to use the ActionBarCompat library. Once we had got a Gradle build working, we found that we had a lot of resource errors once we switched the compiler to compile against API 7. In this article we’ll look…

ActionBarCompat – Part 1

Back in August 2012, the first article in a series of 12 was posted to Styling Android which provided an in-depth look at the ActionBar. It had been rumoured for a while before I/O 2013 that Google were working on a compatibility library for ActionBar, and this was duly announced at I/O. In this series…