Grokking Android

Getting Down to the Nitty Gritty of Android Development

Author archive for Wolfram Rittmeyer:

Why Google Limits APIs With Every Android Release: We Devs are to Blame!

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Last week Android Q was released. And the first thing that came to my mind when reading the Android Q announcement was: “Finer grained location permissions! Thats’s great!” But then, it got me thinking: “Wait a moment! Why is this even necessary?” Don’t get me wrong, I really think this addition is necessary and it […]  Continue Reading  “Why Google Limits APIs With Every Android Release: We Devs are to Blame!”

Creating Kotlin DSLs

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Kotlin has many nice things going for it – be it null safety, data classes, extension functions, immutable collections or many other things. For me one additional thing is very interesting: The ability to create domain specific languages (DSLs) easily. Easily, because creating a DSL with Kotlin means that you simply choose to combine several […]  Continue Reading  “Creating Kotlin DSLs”

Those “mobile apps are doomed” headlines? They are wrong!

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So lately there are a lot of headlines appearing that say “Businesses Moving To Chatbots, AI; Away From Mobile Apps”, “The Rise of Chatbots – Why they’ll replace All Your Apps!” or “How Bots Will Completely Kill Websites and Mobile Apps”. First of all: Look at where those headlines appear. Some of these websites – […]  Continue Reading  “Those “mobile apps are doomed” headlines? They are wrong!”

Using the Actions SDK to Develop for the Google Assistant

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In today’s post I’m going to show how to develop a simple app for the Google Assistant. For developing this app, I will be using the Actions SDK. My next post will use Dialogflow (formerly api.ai) instead. After reading both posts you hopefully will know enough to decide which approach is better suited for you. […]  Continue Reading  “Using the Actions SDK to Develop for the Google Assistant”

A Primer on Cloud Functions for Firebase

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Since I am going to use Cloud Functions For Firebase a bit more in coming posts on this blog, I am going to give a very brief overview of how you can use and test them. What are Cloud Functions for Firebase Cloud Functions is a node.js based offering where you can expose stateless services. […]  Continue Reading  “A Primer on Cloud Functions for Firebase”

Quick Intro Into Actions on Google

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Google Home will finally be available in Germany on August, 8th and in France this week. I’m not aware of more announcements for other countries, but I hope and assume that availability will increase to many more countries as soon as possible.1) For me, though, getting my AIY kit was the day, I started getting […]  Continue Reading  “Quick Intro Into Actions on Google”

Android Things: Remote Controlled Car – What’s Coming Up

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Being an Android Developer, Google’s announcement of Android Things immediately piqued my interest. As all the others I started out with buying one of the developer kits and then making some lights blink. Nice. But, well, if I have to be honest with myself, that was fun but actually of only limited use 🙂  Then […]  Continue Reading  “Android Things: Remote Controlled Car – What’s Coming Up”

Android’s ConstraintLayout: Align One View’s Edge to Another View’s Center

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As you can see from the following excerpt of ConstraintLayout's supported attributes, there is no layout_constraintStart_toCenterX attribute. Thus you cannot directly align the left edge of one view to the center of another view. But ConstraintLayout is flexible enough to get your view aligned to the center of another view without such an attribute. Even […]  Continue Reading  “Android’s ConstraintLayout: Align One View’s Edge to Another View’s Center”

Some Thoughts on Android’s new ConstraintLayout and Android Studio’s new Design Editor

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At this year’s IO Google introduced a new layout – the ConstraintLayout – and also presented it’s totally revamped layout editor. I am not going into how to use the layout. Google itself has done a good job in explaining it with its code lab “Using ConstraintLayout to design your views”. In this post I […]  Continue Reading  “Some Thoughts on Android’s new ConstraintLayout and Android Studio’s new Design Editor”

RxJava’s Side Effect Methods

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RxJava’s Observable class has plenty of methods that can be used to transform the stream of emitted items to the kind of data that you need. Those methods are at the very core of RxJava and form a big part of it’s attraction. But there are other methods, that do not change the stream of […]  Continue Reading  “RxJava’s Side Effect Methods”