Android

The year was 1997. The Red Hot Chili Peppers were musing on love and the motions of amusement park rides, Pathfinder landed on Mars and Leonardo DiCaprio drew Kate Winslet as per one of his French associates.  It was around this time I had heard about a thing called “Java”, a fancy new language everyone was talking about. The word on IRC was that it was based on work Sun Microsystems had originally done for embedded software on set-top boxes and other smart appliances.

ns

Native-what?

If you’re anything like myself before embarking on this project then you might wonder the same thing. Everyone has heard of React Native, it’s a popular technology enabling a cross-platform mobile development experience, but not so many have crossed paths with Nativescript, or {N}. Nativescript is a framework with a similar goal to React Native, providing the ability to publish native apps for both major platforms, iOS and Android, whilst only maintaining a single (mostly) JavaScript codebase.  It is available in three flavours: standard, Angular, and Vue.js, allowing developers with experience in the latter two frameworks to use their existing skills whilst building for mobile. Put simply, it’s a JavaScript runtime inside a native app, translating code on the fly into native elements.  In this post, I’m going to tell you about a few of the nice experiences we’ve had recently developing with Nativescript, as well as a few of the not so nice issues that were encountered, and whether we’d use it again.
OK Google, generate a clickbait title for my Google I/O 2017 blog post I've generated a title, Gareth. What would you like to add next? OK Google, I'm a bit jet lagged - remind me what I saw at Google I/O 2017 I would love to help, Gareth, but I'm going to need a little more information. Would you like that information in chronological order, or grouped by topic?

Shine is super proud to announce that senior consultant Ben Teese (@benteese) will be speaking at the YOW! Conference being held in Melbourne on the 3rd and 4th of December 2015. Ben will actually be co-presenting this one with Sam Ritchie (@FakeSamRitchie), an iOS developer from Perth. Sam will be talking about ReactiveCocoa,...

yowconnected Last week I had the privilege of attending the YOW! Connected conference in Melbourne, Australia. YOW! Connected offers a look at all the interesting things that are happening in the mobile and IoT (Internet of Things) space, from the perspective of both software developers and UX designers. On the mobile front it included a variety of talks relating to both the iOS and Android platforms and yes, even a little bit of Windows. In general all the talks that I went to were pretty good,  but here I will write about a few that particularly interested me.
https://plus.google.com/u/0/communities/105113874753230740413 src: https://plus.google.com/u/0/communities/105113874753230740413 Last week I had to pry myself away from my day-to-day life as a software developer and fly over the Pacific to attend Google I/O. Okay maybe I didn’t have to pry myself away - rather, it was more like me excitedly not sleeping for 2 days, giddy as a school kid, prior to leaving. I was lucky enough to be personally invited this year to both the conference and to other GDG organiser events to meet other community leaders across the globe. It’s safe to say I had high expectations. I was expecting it to be big, but what I found was a mecca for geeks. A place where being a nerd was cool, wearing glass and wearables was not only normal but encouraged, and a place where everyone wanted to talk to you about the products they have been building and what tech stack and services made it possible. To say that I was blown away is an understatement -- and this is just the people and culture surrounding the event. Let's not forget the main reason I was there: I/O is the main stage for Google to announce their new product pipeline for the year. In this blog entry I’ll highlight the big announcements, albeit at a very high level.
Android's built-in testing framework is lacking on a number of levels. Enter Robotium, an open-source project. Robotium connects the dots by extending Android’s testing framework and providing convenience methods to help developers rapidly create tests. In this entry I will show how Robotium can be used for data input, finding and testing views and buttons, testing between multiple activities, and testing activities with extras. I'll also show how to work around issues with race-conditions in UI tests. I have created a GitHub project with a sample application and test project.
The Android FamilySoftware fragmentation is a common concern for Android developers. Right now, supporting all versions down to Android 2.2 (Froyo) will make your application available to 93.5% of Google Play users. However, doing so also means you miss out on APIs that were released in the last 2 years. In this post I'll talk about this problem in detail, and highlight a few libraries available that help you develop an Android 2.2 application without limiting yourself to old APIs.