From Previewing Android P: In Android P we continue to refine Doze, App Standby, and Background Limits to further improve battery life; please be sure to try your apps with these and send feedback. They don’t point to any specific improvements for Doze, App Standby and Background Limits. Maybe they didn’t quite reach their goals…

Category: Android App
Flutter’s Hot Reload is Extremely Fast
Trying out Flutter’s “hot reload” feature, I have to say: it’s really fast. Hot reload looks like a big step forward in productivity, even compared to conventional Android’s “Instant Run” feature. Great job, Team Flutter.
Looking Forward to Final Release of Android Studio 3
Over three months ago, when the android team first announced Android Studio 3 , I installed it alongside Android Studio 2. But, after I ran into some mysterious bad behaviors, I decided to uninstall both versions. That solved the problem. But, I ultimately decided to reinstall only version 2 and wait for the stable 3.0…
Quick Notes On Dockter’s 2015 BABBQ Talk on the Android Gradle Build System
Hans Dockter gave a talk about the Android Gradle build system at Big Android BBQ 2015. (No bbq for me … saw it on youtube … woo hoo) Dockter addresses the issue of Android build performance in the last half of the talk. A few of my takeaways, for what they’re worth: Android developers should try an upgrade to Gradle…
Why I Try Not to Implement Parcelable
The short answer is: Parcelable implementations are overly complicated and brittle, I’m bad at finding and fixing “Unmarshalling unknown type code” errors and I’m tired of being surprised by them. There are hundreds of questions about Parcelable errors on StackOverflow. I’ve had my fill of trying to implement solutions (e.g. proguard configuration adjustments, read/write out of order, etc) and…
Android Percentage Based Layouts
It looks like Android is now offering percentage based spacing in a new layout object. I believe Cascading Style Sheets had specified that feature by 1998.
Saving State in a Compound Control
If you’re writing an android compound control and you want to save state between config changes, you may want to tell the Android SDK to butt out. That is, you may want your compound control to be fully in charge of saving and restoring the states of its internal views. Why would you want to…
TextView Plus SeekBar
One way to couple a dynamically updating TextView with a SeekBar is to use a TextSeekBar.
Browzacado
UPDATE: On 02/11/2015, Google removed this app from the Google Play Store. If you’re interested in identifying different avocados or avocado trees, Browzacado is a free, ad-free android app I wrote to make it easy to display a list of avocado varieties by search criteria. It’s basically a mobile friendly front-end to the excellent, public avocado web pages published…