At the end of last February, the Android developers youtube channel launched a new series called Pivotal where Reto Meier screencasts a way how to build a simple location-based app.
There is only one video out as for now, but the content looks promising in several ways. Not only because as Reto says “There’s a thousand ways in which this implementation is wrong, and the end of the video explains some of why everything should be done differently” but also, and mainly, because it shows that everyone makes mistakes.
This week I published the talk I had given on how I evolved from a Monolithic architecture to a Clean Architecture based on Fernando Cejas proposal but with a few differences in the domain layer which I would like to explain. I am not saying these are better approaches but just some tweaks that made the data flow and the architecture clearer to me, so take them with a grain of salt.
It has been a while since my last blog post about Xamarin and I feel this is the time to write something more about it. Although I haven’t been working with Xamarin for some months, I will write here some questions people often asked me when I was full-time working with it:
Have you used any java library directly? How easy is it to use them First of all, let me say that Xamarin itself created a github account with many samples some of which have Android API wrappers for C# of popular java libraries (ex: ActionBarSherlock) which is worth checking out.
Two months ago during one of my normal days at the office I was told that there was a private school looking for android developers that were available to teach. That school needed someone for 3 times a week (for a 66 hour course) and my boss asked me if I wanted to take the opportunity. The course consisted in a 24h Java introduction, 24h for Android and 18h for a project.
Now, first of all let me tell you that I have never done any online course before. I knew about Udemy, Code Academy and even Coursera (where I was planning to start one) but Udacity’s course caught my attention because the lecturers are employees from Google. Another reason that grabbed my attention was the fact that it was about User Experience with a focus on Android, a theme that I am passionate about but which I have never seen in any other website.
Therefore, this post is the first one from a series of tips I would like to give to everyone who is just starting to develop applications for Android. The tips will be based on my experience and on what I’ve learnt from more experienced developers over the time.
So without further ado, let’s start:
Always use shapes (circles and squares) drawn in xml, whenever you can, for performance / flexibility reasons.
It has been 13 months since I started developing for Android and until now I have been using eclipse/IntelliJ as my IDEs, however, a new professional commitment made me to develop for Android using Xamarin and this blog post discusses my first impressions that i’ve experienced as an Android developer with Xamarin.
“With Xamarin, you write your apps entirely in C#, sharing the same code on iOS, Android and Mac” is Xamarin’s moto as a platform to develop iOS and Android with C# instead of Objective-C or Java respectively.