VectorDrawables – Part 2

In the previous article we looked at how to convert an existing SVG image in to a VectorDrawable which enables us to replace lots of large bitmap Drawables which can be mutch smaller and are much easier to maintain. However that’s not where the benefit of VectorDrawables end – we can also animate then and…

VectorDrawables – Part 1

One of the really exciting new features in Lollipop is the inclusion of VectorDrawable and some associated classes which provide some extremely powerful new options for adding complex vector graphics as paths (which will scale across form-factors, screen sizes, and densities much better than bitmaps), and provide some equally powerful tools to animate them. In…

Gradle Revisited

Back in May 2013 Google announced at IO that they were working on a completely new IDE based upon IntelliJ IDEA which would be based upon the Gradle build system. At the end of June in the same year I began a series of posts which ended up as a series of 9 posts (the…

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…

Material – Part 7

In the previous article we began looking at how RecyclerView makes life an awful lot easier when dragging list items to alter their position. We looked at how we can generate a bitmap of the view that we want to drag, and promote it to an overlay layer so that we can move it around…

Material – Part 6

Previously in this series we have applied basic Material design to a simple RSS reader app, and most recently we converted our ListView to the new RecyclerView. However, at the conclusion of the previous article, we had completed this migration but the net result in terms of UI was zero – the behaviour was exactly…

Material – Part 5

The the previous article we began the migration from ListView to RecyclerView by moving our Adapter implementation to RecyclerView.Adapter. In this article we’ll complete the migration and also find one small, but easily resolved problem along the way.

Material – Part 4

Previously in this series we’ve looked at applying some aspects of Material design to our simple RSS app. In this article we’re going to look at replacing our ListView implementation with RecyclerView. While this won’t have any effect of the user, it will be an enabler which will allow us to apply some more material…

Material – Part 2

In the previous article we got a simple app working which is a simple RSS viewer showing a list of recent Styling Android posts, and a detail view when you click on them. In this article we’ll look at applying some material design principles to the app and also try and make it backwards compatible…