Phew! We’ve started fearing winter is never going to leave us alone, but fortunately, we were wrong. As we started basking in first warm rays of sunlight, it hit us: we must share our new-found optimism with all of you out there, and since we are developers, new libraries are the only way we know how to do that. So let’s get on with it!

0. Lottie

Usually, we promote not so well known libraries but this one is new and we wanted to be sure everyone sees it so we made an exception — Lottie, new library from Airbnb, is here to beautify our apps beyond our wildest dreams! But not beyond our designers, so that is where they come into play. To keep the long story short, it helps you implement all the fancy animated views you will need and designers can design. Check it out!

Stolen from https://github.com/airbnb/lottie-android

1. FlexibleAdapter

This one is from our house. Filip Babic, a talented young developer from COBE, got tired of rewriting those boring adapters and decided to make a simple flexible, write-once use-all-the-time kind of a deal. It’s pretty straightforward to use and will make your life easier and reduce the amount of boilerplate code. We like it and hope you will like it too. Read more about it here:

2. ExpectAnim

You guys probably already know that we are animation junkies. If you are also one, and if you ever wanted to make your animations obey your commands (literally), try out this lib. It gives you an option to tell all of your views what you expect them to do and that is more or less it. Start your animation and see your TextView obeying. Good boy! There is a possibility to connect an animation with a ScrollView. Sweet. Much movement. Check it out.

Stolen from https://github.com/florent37/ExpectAnim

3. Chuck

We all know that it’s possible to add logging interceptor when using OkHttp. The problem is when you have no USB connection to your development machine and want to see how your requests are doing (no brake for you, developer-creature!). When enabled, Chuck will give you a list of all requests with their status, body and response (for your app only, of course). It also supports multi-window mode to make inspecting requests easier.

Stolen from https://github.com/jgilfelt/chuck

4. indeterminate-checkbox

“Only a Sith deals in absolutes.” -Obi-Wan Kenobi

Not everything is black or white, neither is everything true or false (if you are not a boolean, of course). Sometimes, before a decision is made, it’s best to keep a state of something as undefined. To help that in Android world, for CheckBox and RadioButton, there is this helpful library. It’s pretty much self-explanatory what it does, and it does it in a simple way.

Just the way, a-ha a-ha, I like it, a-ha a-ha.