Blurring Images – Part 2

Previously we looked at a method which uses RenderScript to blur the section of an image which lies within the bounds of another view. However we didn’t get as far as actually calling that method and see the blurring in action. The reason for this is that we need to think quite carefully about performance,…

Gradle Build – Part 6

Previously in this series we’ve looked at various aspects of the Android Gradle build system and how we can adapt things in various ways. But what about if we want to convert our existing projects to use the Gradle build system? In this article we’ll do precisely that.

Navigation Drawer – Part 3

In the previous article we began hooking our navigation drawer up to the ActionBar by connecting up the Up/Home button. In this concluding article we’ll change the ActionBar title, and hide any content-specific menus when the drawer is open.

Navigation Drawer – Part 1

As I am writing this it is Google I/O week 2013. Amongst the new releases this week is a new version of the v4 support library (release 13) which contains support for the Navigation Drawer pattern. This pattern steadily grown in popularity, but until this point there has been no official support and guidelines from…

GridLayout – Revisited

Back in November 2011 I posted a two part series to Styling Android which covered GridLayout which was introduced in Ice Cream Sandwich (API 14). In those articles, I have mentioned that there were hints from Google’s Dianne Hackbourn that it would be released as a compatibility library project, and it has been. However, there…

Basic ActionBar – Part 5

In the previous article we looked at using different controls in our ActionBar to provide custom behaviour. That’s all well and good, but suppose we actually want to do something a little more complex? In this article we’ll have a look at how we can use custom layouts within our ActionBar.

Compound Drawables

I recently learned about a small feature in Android which has been there since API level 1 (the variant that we’ll use has been in there since API 3, but others appeared in API 1): Compound Drawables. In this article we’ll have a look at what they are and see how we can use them…

Presenter – Part 6

In previous articles in this series we have looked at the app that I used for my presentation at AndroidConf Brasil 2011. In this concluding part we’ll have a look at some of the animations that were used throughout the presentation.

Presenter – Part 5

Previously in this series we have looked at the custom controls that are used in the app that I used for my presentation at AndroidConf Brasil 2011. Now that we’ve got a lot of the dry code out of the way, we can begin to explore the slide layouts to see how we combine those…