Writing a Christmas themed blog post has become something of an annual tradition for Styling Android. This year I am extremely pleased to inflict Christmas Face on to the world. Christmas Face is a simple app which allows the user to magically transform themself in to either Santa Claus or an elf. Last year’s Christmas…
Tag: androiddev
Christmas Face – Part 1
Writing a Christmas themed blog post has become something of an annual tradition for Styling Android. This year I am extremely pleased to inflict Christmas Face on to the world. Christmas Face is a simple app which allows the user to magically transform themself in to either Santa Claus or an elf. Last year’s Christmas…
Task Stack
There are often occasions when we need to take the user to a specific Activity and / or piece of content within an app. A typical use-case for this is a notification where tapping on the notification should launch the app directly to a specific place. In the recent series or Oreo Notification Channels we…
Oreo Notifications: Channels – Part 2
In what seems to be an annual traditions for Styling Android, we’er going to look at the changes to Notifications in the latest version of Android which is, at the time of writing, Oreo 8.1 (API 27). While there aren’t widespread changes to Notifications as there have been in previous Android versions, there are some…
Oreo Notifications: Channels – Part 1
In what seems to be an annual traditions for Styling Android, we’er going to look at the changes to Notifications in the latest version of Android which is, at the time of writing, Oreo 8.1 (API 27). While there aren’t widespread changes to Notifications as there have been in previous Android versions, there are some…
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.
Currency Curiosities
Formatting currency values can be tricky because to do it correctly requires knowledge of each individual currency and how it should be rendered. Fortunately the java.text package contains some classes which have that local knowledge which means that us developers do not need it, except in really rare circumstances. However, there are some subtleties to…
RadialGradient – Gradients
In a recent series of posts for the MidiPad app, there was a discussion regarding the use of a RadialGradiant to render each PadView and, for aesthetic reasons, this was done using a software layer rather than a hardware layer. In this concluding article we’ll explore a way of adapting things to use a hardware…
RadialGradient – Layers
In a recent series of posts for the MidiPad app, there was a discussion regarding the use of a RadialGradiant to render each PadView and, for aesthetic reasons, this was done using a software layer rather than a hardware layer. In this short series we’ll first take a look at what the differences are, and…
MidiPad – Midi Events
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…