Dirty Phrasebook – Part 4

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. In 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 look at the custom…

Floating Action Button – Part 2

In the previous article we constructed a simple implementation of a Floating Action Button which conformed to the material design guidelines in terms of being elevated above the background (with the appropriate shadow) and rising to meet your finger when it is touched. In this article we’ll turn our attention to animating the icon to…

Material – Part 8

Previously in this series we’ve looked at a number of different things that we can do to begin applying some principles of material design to our apps. In this concluding article in this series we’ll turn our attention to Activity transitions which are an important part of material design as they are designed to provide…

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.…

App Polish

Often we complete the functional aspect of an Android project, and when it comes to adding some sparkle to the UI to really make it appealing to the user inspiration can be a little lacking. In this article we’ll start of with a really functional but boring app, and turn it in to something much…

Blurring Images – Part 7

In the previous article we performed some simple optimisations which enormously improved the frame rate of our animations. However, we mentioned that increasing the size of the area that we wish to blur will slow the frame rate because the complexity of the blur operation will increase exponentially. In this article we’ll look at an…

Blurring Images – Part 6

In the previous article we looked at frame rates, and explored how we can measure them by adding some simple benchmarking logging. In this article we’ll look at implementing our dynamic blurring so that we can animate things, and optimising things to improve our framerate.

Blurring Images – Part 5

So far in this series there have been quite a few mentions of frame rates, and assertions that we want to keep our frame rates as high as possible. In this article we’ll look a little closer at how we can measure frame rates, and explore how changes in our layouts and views can affect…