Mandelbrot: Basic Viewer

In this series we’re going to build an app to view the Mandelbrot set. While this is not necessarily something that is likely to be of direct use to the majority of app developers (except for those that have a desire to develop their own Mandelbrot set viewing apps), there are some techniques that we’ll…

Parcelize

A Parcel is an optimised serialisation format for Android which is designed to enable us to transfer data between processes. This is something that most Android developers need to do occasionally, but not that often. Making a class Pareclizable actually requires a little bit of effort, but there’s a Kotlin extension that simplifies things enormously.…

Kotlin: Function References

Kotlin is a very feature rich language with and the subtleties of some of these features are worthy of some exploration to fully appreciate. In this ad-hoc series we’ll look at some of these, and in this article we’ll look at function references and some of the really nice tricks that we can achieve with…

Muselee 12: Repository – Part 2

Muselee is a demo app which allows the user to browse popular music artists. It is not intended to be a fully-featured user app, but a vehicle to explore good app architecture, how to implement current best-practice, and explore how the two often go hand in hand. Moreover it will be used to explore how…

Muselee 4: Gradle Kotlin DSL

Muselee is a demo app which allows the user to browse popular music artists. It is not intended to be a fully-featured user app, but a vehicle to explore good app architecture, how to implement current best-practice, and explore how the two often go hand in hand. Moreover it will be used to explore how…

Kotlin: Mutability

Kotlin is a very rich language with much subtlety tucked away. In this occasional series (meaning that there will be occasional, standalone posts covering distinct areas) we’ll explore some of these subtleties. In this post we’ll take a look at mutability.

Kotlin: Contexts & SharedPreferences

In advance of a new series of posts which start next week, I ported the code from a previous series of articles to Kotlin. I opted to port the code manually rather than rely on any automated conversions and there are a couple of things worthy of explanation hence this article.

MidiPad – Discovering MIDI Devices

Musical Instrument Digital Interface (MIDI) has been around since the early 1980’s and the basic specification has changed little since. It is a standard by which electronic musical instruments and other devices can communicate with each other. In Marshmallow (V6.0 – API 23) Android actually got some good MIDI support, and in this series of…

MidiPad – Tricks With Kotlin And Architecture Components

Musical Instrument Digital Interface (MIDI) has been around since the early 1980’s and the basic specification has changed little since. It is a standard by which electronic musical instruments and other devices can communicate with each other. In Marshmallow (V6.0 – API 23) Android actually got some good MIDI support, and in this series of…

Kotlin Testability – Part 2

The more observant regular readers of Styling Android will be aware that recently all of the sample code has switched from Java to Kotlin. There are many aspects of Kotlin which make our lives as developers much easier and recently I have been exploring how to make Kotlin classes easier to test. In this short…