In Part 1, I wrote about choosing a language and network library for your new Android Project. The next topic I want to write about is UI. UI is essential for every Android Application. Excellent looking App could engage more users. The good thing about Android Development is that now we have more options to build UI and interact with views as before. So let me share with you some of those options.

XML

Create Android UI using XML layout files is a default approach used from the beginning of Android Development history. XML was chosen not only for Android UI…

Android Development is evolving very fast. There are many instruments and libraries which can help you develop Android Application. I decided to write series of articles to help people who only start with Android Development to choose the right libraries for their project.

Language

So first of all let’s choose the language. If we are speaking about classical native android development there are two options. You can use Java or Kotlin.

For the experienced Android Developers the choice is pretty obvious. If you ask them, you will hear: “Of course Kotlin!”. For other people this is still something to discuss. So…

When I started to write this article I didn’t know how to code Flutter apps. To start this story let me introduce myself. I’m Andrew, Android Developer, not good not bad, just the regular. Also what I want to say about myself, is that I don’t like any cross-platform solutions. I already tried PhoneGap, Xamarin and of course React Native. I don’t want to talk a lot about advantages and disadvantages of these technologies, I just want to say that I don’t like them. Starting from the idea or architecture finishing IDE or programming language which is used here. …

Annotation processing is one of the most interesting topics for me to learn and understand and here I want to share my results.

I’m almost sure that every Android developer uses annotation processors in projects. Usually we are using frameworks with already written processors e.g Butterknife, DataBinding, Dagger, etc. But what about writing our own processor to make our code look better. First of all I want to describe a problem that I’m going to solve.

Usecase

I’m using Kotlin and I don’t like how interface implementation looks like. It looks almost like in Java. Here is a simple example:

Imagine…

Hope you enjoyed the first part of my story about Kotlin Collections. In the second part I’m going to touch sets and maps. I will answer the following questions:

• What extend these collections?
• What about mutability and immutability?
• How to create such collections?

Read full story on Runtastic blog

Everyday during Java/Android development we use collection for different purposes: modifying data collections, displaying an UI with a list of items as well as business logic related processes. Java collections are quite straightforward and easy component for simple use cases. At the same time we have a lot of different collection interfaces implementations. t’s the developer’s task to choose the right implementation for the given purpose. Of course you still have Java to Kotlin compatibility, so all Java collections are available for Kotlin applications as well. Lets check what actually Kotlin collections are. …

Hello VR developers! I hope you enjoyed the first part of my story. And now we are ready to make more complex things.

What should we do this time?

I have an idea to develop a simple game for VR. I want it to be a shooter, and I hope you’ll like it. First of all for the game we need a menu. Unfortunately there are no standard menus or collection views available out of the box in GearVR framework. But there is a possibility to use simple Android views in VR application and I will show you how to do this.

Creating a menu

As a menu solution…

Kotlin is now an official language for Android development! Congrats to all Kotlin lovers. And now Kotlin open source libraries and projects are one of the hottest topics for all Android developers. What have we here? What if I want to use only Kotlin libraries for my project? In this article I’ll try to give you some answers :)

Architecture

1. What are you using for API calls? Retrofit or Volley? There is a better alternative for Kotlin projects. There is Fuel from Kittinun Vantasin that is easy to implement:

repositories {
    jcenter()
}

dependencies {
    compile 'com.github.kittinunf.fuel:fuel:<latest-version>'…