Many folks in our industry are familiar with unit testing, and practice it daily. Some folks get to the extreme of considering tests more important than production code, while others think it’s just a waste of time, but unit tests have saved my bacon more times than I care to…

You probably have heard that JFrog, the company behind Bintray and JCenter, is shutting down these (mostly free) services soon. Whether you’re the author or a user of any of the nearly 800,000 libraries that are exclusively available on JCenter, you’re probably wondering what’s going on and how to deal…

Most people are just fine with the integrated webcams in their laptops, because after all, if you’re in a meeting where everyone uses their crappy built-in webcam and microphone, there’s no point in doing any better. But what if you need to record or stream some quality content? Say, giving…

First of all, thanks to Doug Stevenson for an enlightening chat last week around Droidcon Italy. He opened my eyes on why the emails we were getting about Squanchy Firestore rules pointed at a bigger problem than we initially thought. And many thanks to Daniele Conti for fixing it! 🙌 …

It’s only been three weeks since the Droidcon Turin CfP has closed, and we have already published the full schedule for the event. As customary for our CfP committee, we are committed to full transparency, and this year we decided to make our retrospective public. The committee First of all, I…

Playing with elevation in Android 🥧 (part 1) - Sebastiano Poggi - Medium With Android Pie we gained the ability to tint our shadows. This mini-series looks into how this works and how to make…tips.seebrock3r.me In the first part of this article we saw the new APIs introduced in Android Pie that allow us to have coloured elevation shadows. Our ambition had been crushed by the cruel design of elevation shadows APIs, which impose abysmal values for the alphas, thus making even the most lively…

I recently wrote an article about elevation in Android, showing how you can hack around framework restrictions to obtain elevation shadows that are different than what the Material Design guidelines mandate. Playing with elevation in Android Elevation in Android is way more flexible than you’d think…blog.usejournal.com Since then, there’s been a few interesting developments on the topic, and this follow-up article will cover them. Come…

tl;dr Kotlin properties are awesome and super powerful, but each form comes with a bunch of gotchas. Make sure you fully understand them before deciding what type of property you use! Kotlin boasts an excellent support for properties. No more you are limited to the bare-bones fields that Java offered…

tl;dr property syntax is great but you should avoid properties hiding expensive operations in their custom getter/setter as it can be misleading for those using the API from outside. Prefer functions instead in those cases. Unlike Java, Kotlin has first-class properties. In Kotlin, a property can be read-only — or…