Articles & Tutorials

Four Ways To Build A Mobile Application (mobile.smashingmagazine.com) This article is the second in a series of four articles covering four ways to develop mobile applications. In this article, the author looks at how to build a simple application using native Android tools.

Mapbox for Android blasts off (www.mapbox.com) Based on OSMDroid, a popular Java library for embedding OpenStreetMap in Android apps, the MapBox SDK brings support for the latest versions of Android, easy integration with Mapbox map IDs, and lays the groundwork for the features they'll be adding and improving upon.

Espresso 1.1 (plus.google.com)

Almost 3 months have passed since the launch of Espresso testing framework for Android; time flies when you’re doing UI testing. We are excited to share a new version 1.1 with you.

Google Play Services 4.1 (android-developers.blogspot.com)

The latest release of Google Play services has begun rolling out to users. It includes new Turn Based Multiplayer support for games, and a preliminary API for integrating Google Drive into your apps, along with a few more updated features.

Testing on Android (Part 2): Functional Tests (daniel-codes.blogspot.com)

Here's part two of Daniel Lew's series on Android testing. This time, he's going to wade into the huge number of functional testing frameworks that exist and discuss the best ones.

TextClock Version 2 – Part 2 (blog.stylingandroid.com)

Mark Allison revisits his series on making a simple widget, and looks at some changes that can be made to add some polish, and also bring it up to date with the latest version of Android (4.4 Kitkat, at the time of writing).

Sponsored

Wearables DevCon (www.wearablesdevcon.com) Wearables DevCon is a groundbreaking event for designers, builders and developers of wearable computing devices and software. Leading research analysts project up to 400 million devices to be sold annually by 2017. Learn how to develop for the coolest gadgets and next wave of computing devices like Google Glass, FitBit, Pebble, the SmartWatch 2, Jawbone, and the Galaxy Gear SmartWatch and be a part of the wearables technology revolution! Use code WEARIT for a $200 conference discount. Expo is free!

Dolby Brings Better Audio to Apps (developer.dolby.com) Creating an impressive sound experience in your app or game just got easier with the debut of the Dolby Audio API. The API is 100% free, easy to integrate, and the impact is immediate. The result: Optimized audio with more natural, balanced sound. Download today!

Design

Free Vector Icons (www.flaticon.com) This is a huge collection of freely available icons that you can use in your apps. They only require that the author be credited within your app.

Jobs

Senior Game Developer @ Social Point (hire.jobvite.com)

As a Senior Game Developer you will build our amazing games and contribute to improve them daily. You need strong background in C++, solid understanding of 2D/3D graphics and math involved in computer graphics and previous game development experience. Location: Barcelona.

Tools

Introducing ButterKnifeZelezny for Android (plus.google.com)

Save even more coding time with this Android Studio/IDEA plugin. It generates ButterKnife injections directly from XML layouts.

Scalpel (github.com)

A surgical debugging tool to uncover the layers under your app -- it provides a 3D view of your layers to help uncover layout issues and inefficiencies.

Business

Why we launched on both iOS and Android (blog.cloudmagic.com)

The developers at CloudMagic share why they chose to deliver a new app on both Android and iOS

Videos