Kotlin Platform Types, Nullable Annotations and AOSP: A Cautionary Tale

I think it is fair to say that most of us are super happy with how nullability is handled in Kotlin. The overall code that we are writing with nullability in mind is mostly cleaner looking and helps us avoid the pitfalls we saw in Java. Having said that *Platform Types* are a place in particular that I ran into where I feel like the developer experience and the impact to the user is worse. If you are not aware, *[Platform Types][1]* are types that were created when Kotlin cannot infer the nullability of a type from Java.

Android Studio Tip #004: Finding concrete methods of Interfaces

Have you ever found yourself navigating through code and ending up at an Interface, instead of the concrete implementation you were hoping for? During Yun Cheng's talk - MVP The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up Your Presentation Layer (at 360 AndDev), her and her team uncovered that exact command.

Android Studio Tip #003: Swap Intention Action

Today’s tip is going to be short and sweet. I was testing an internal library that I had little experience with a few days ago, when I noticed that for one method invocation I had reversed the inputs. This was partially to do with the lack of documentation and the fact that this legacy library lacked human readable parameter names, but I digress. The problem I had was that this method invocation was used enough that I didn’t want to swap all of the values by hand. 

Dex Redux

In October of 2014 a friend and past colleague of mine, Mustafa Ali, wrote a great Medium article to help solve a problem that many Android developers have encountered at one point in their career. The Dex method issue in short is a limit to the amount of executable methods allowed in Android's Dalvik Executable file (the one used to execute Android code). Shortly after writing his guide Google did the unthinkable... they released a support library. The library creates multiple dex files to help apps that are large get around the single dex file limit issue. Though this is a great solution for large apps Google suggests to use Proguard to strip your app of unused code or to reduce your dependency on libraries as a whole. The former is much easier than the latter. 

Re: Chathead Basics

In Pierre-Yves Ricau's blog from 2013 he walks you through how to make a very basic version of Facebook's Chatheads, which if you haven't read is a great read and is yet another reason why I love Android. At the end of his blog he asked the question:

"Does this imply that Facebook Chatheads (or any application with SYSTEM_ALERT_WINDOW permission) is able to conduct keylogging and take screenshots at arbitrary time?"

It was a great question but after trying to explore more with adding views directly to the window I think I found another concern.

Android Studio Tip #001: Bookmarks and Favorites

Chances are if you are an Android developer there are a bunch of really amazing features hiding in Android Studio that you have probably yet to discover. I am definitely not the exception to that and yesterday I stumbled upon (/took the time to understand) a few features that have so far made my life much easier. These features are Bookmarks and Favorites.

Being an Advocate for Android

“We can just port this from iOS to Android”  If you are an Android engineer then chances are you have heard this phrase many times in the past few years. It may even be because of this phrase that you are here today. I am no exception to this quandary, numerous times in my career I have found myself responding to this question or others like it. The first time I heard this I became irritated because certainly any designer working in the mobile industry already knew everything about Android. I quickly realized that this wasn’t one person neglecting the beloved Android platform. The problem is a lack of day to day experience with the platform. From that day forward I decided I will not contribute to the growing divide between the Android organization and the rest of my company. That was the day I became an advocate for Android.

Fragments and the Toolbar

I am not one to generally praise Fragments, its mostly the navigational stack that always seem to give me a plethora of issues. Having said that, its comforting to find something that works the way you would expect. A few days ago I found that at the intersection of the Fragment and the Toolbar (formerly known as the Actionbar).

Mockito Verify Inconsistency

When I initially set out to blog about Mockito I wanted to write a post where I explained the Verify API. Though there wasn't much in the realm of posts around this topic, I think that the javadocs have ample examples. Maybe the only topic that would be worth covering for a second post would be good places to use Verify. I recently have been working a lot with the Verify API and found some inconsistencies that I wanted to share so that if you are using Mockito you can avoid the pain I had. So here it is two weeks later and here is my post about some caveats while using the Verify API.

What developers should care about at I/O this year

Every year for the past 7 years the tech industry, financial analysts and tech aficionados alike post numerous blogs with rumors about the years I/O. This year is no exception. To give a different perspective, and maybe an altogether different approach, I have decided to come up with a few major things that Android developers should care about this I/O.

What I want from Google Maps SDK for Android

For the past two months Google Maps and mapping has consumed a large portion of my life. During this time I have come to love and hate Google Maps V2. Besides just writing up a couple of issue trackers, I figured I would share my findings in hopes that it saves another developer the stress.

Touch Listeners

User input is super critical to be able to build robust mobile applications. The maps SDK falls short at providing developers the ability to differentiate between user input and programmatic camera changes. Currently the only way to tell that the user has interacted with the map is through the onCameraChangeListnener which should be considered a hack more than anything else. The API docs even go as far to say:

During an animation, this listener may not be notified of intermediate camera positions.

The simple fact that it may or may not be notified is a bit irritating to me. I would rather the API draw a line in the sand and either give me all of the changes or just the beginning and the end. I would say for simplicity's sake it would make sense to just give us the update at the end of the animation, then create a new listener for map touch events. Even just the basic touch up and down events would be a huge win.

Markers

A large part of the reason for having a map in your application is to visualize data or information. One tool Google gives us to do this is the marker, in essence a bitmap that represents a location on the map. Though it is probably the most utilized component of the maps SDK it is one of the most underwhelming. Lets take for instance marker animations. If you have done Android development before you would assume that the marker could be animated the same way as any other View. Unfortunately Marker is not a subclass of View so all of the base property animations are off limits. Instead the only field that is worth animating, position, relegates you to simple translations of xy, through the LatLng.

There is also some weirdness when trying to change a markers bitmap after it has been instantiated. The weirdness manifests itself as an IllegalManifestArgumentException when using the setIcon() method. Now Google hasn't officially responded to the issue and the status is marked as needs more info. I am hoping that they will have an answer soon, but until they do I am including this in my wish list. As of the writing of this post, the best way to side step this issue is to remove the marker and re-create the marker with the new bitmap you would like. Not the best of solutions, but I have not seen anything more staright forward.

Overall, a large portion of professional Android development right now is working with 3rd party SDKs and when doing so there is an inherent risk that we as developers assume. For me, the risk of having these issues or deficiencies in Google Maps was not enough to warrant me to look elsewhere for mapping SDKs, but the feature set put before me didn't create that restriction. Though Google Maps is a completely adequate tool, I would love to see more granular control for developers as well as better methods of communicating changes from the user to the developer.