I've repeatedly been getting the question "which IDE should I use for Android?" recently so I'm writing up a brief summary. Here's my current thoughts on the state of Android IDEs (circa December 2013): Eclipse + ADT The original Android IDE, officially supported

A few years ago, when speed and memory became a concern in one of my Android apps, I implemented some streaming JSON parsing using Jackson [http://wiki.fasterxml.com/JacksonHome]. At the time I chose Jackson over Gson [https://code.google.com/p/google-gson/] because the benchmarks seemed to show

There's a sample application that I worked on recently with talented designer Chris Arvin [http://chrisarv.in/] for a talk we gave at DroidCon UK 2013 [https://speakerdeck.com/dlew/crafting-unique-delightful-apps]. I also repurposed part of it for the talk about animations I gave at AnDevCon a few

One of the presenters [https://twitter.com/flipper83] at Droidcon UK 2013 [http://uk.droidcon.com/2013/], during his presentation about ListViews [http://uk.droidcon.com/2013/sessions/dinosaurs-and-androids-the-listview-evolution/] , made the point that View.findViewById() [http://developer.android.com/reference/android/view/View.html#findViewById(int)] has been unjustly villainized

If you're thinking about [DateUtils.getRelativeTimeSpanString()]( http://developer.android.com/reference/android/text/format/DateUtils.html#getRelativeTimeSpanString (long, long, long, int)): don't. After a long struggle I've finally given up on the method. It seems so tempting - an easy way of showing the

Suppose I want a custom View that draws a circle, then a number centered inside of it. Your first attempt will probably look something like this: The problem is that while you can easily set a horizontal alignment for your TextPaint (via Paint.Align [http://developer.android.com/reference/android/

Suppose you're doing a pretty standard Fragment replacement with a custom animation: getSupportFragmentManager() .beginTransaction() .setCustomAnimations(android.R.anim.fade_in, android.R.anim.fade_out) .replace(android.R.id.content, new MyFragment()) .commit(); You may notice that the performance can be a bit rough, not as smooth as

I've recently gotten fed up with how nuts the built-in calendar library is for Java/Android. It's incredibly easy to make mistakes and it's unintuitive at best, so I've finally decided to take the plunge and switch to Joda time. Joda is

A few days we ran into a bug. When we were updating the underlying data for the particular Adapter, the ListView would blow up with this exception: E/AndroidRuntime(1809): java.lang.IllegalStateException: The content of the adapter has changed but ListView did not receive a notification. Make sure the

One aspect of internationalization is to correctly format your date/time strings. Different countries use very different formats and it's easy to incorrectly format your strings for your international users. Your first foray into formatting date/times is probably through java.text.DateFormat [http://developer.android.com/reference/

My latest side project is a randomizer application for the board game Sentinels of the Multiverse [http://sentinelsofthemultiverse.com/]. You can grab the app here: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.idunnolol.sotm You can check out the source here: https://github.com/dlew/android-sotm I have

If you develop apps, you'll probably (at some point) need to load images from the internet. Sometimes you'll load many images at once, as in a ListView or Gallery. Your first foray will be easy, using BitmapFactory to decode a stream - then you run into

A short note about AsyncTask: Prior to 4.0 (and maybe prior to 3.0, but I haven't tested), AsyncTask.getStatus() [http://developer.android.com/reference/android/os/AsyncTask.html#getStatus()] might lie to you. If the AsyncTask is canceled, it won't set the status correctly;

If you write your own custom Views you may eventually want to leverage onSaveInstanceState() [http://developer.android.com/reference/android/view/View.html#onSaveInstanceState()] and onRestoreInstanceState() [http://developer.android.com/reference/android/view/View.html#onRestoreInstanceState(android.os.Parcelable)] to store some data relating to the View. Unlike Activity/Fragment,

I've once again taken a detour from my more serious Android development to do some silly side projects. The first of them is an app for the board game The Resistance [http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/41114/the-resistance] and The Resistance: Avalon [http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/128882/the-resistance-avalon]. I&

There was a helpful article "Why Does My ListView Look Different? [http://community.developer.motorola.com/t5/MOTODEV-Blog/Why-Does-My-ListView-Look-Different/bc-p/18521] " that Motorola posted a few years ago. Unfortunately it has disappeared from the internet, as you might tell by clicking on the link. It had some crucial

One of the cooler features I've found in the Android Action Bar is grouped menu items. If you group together a series of menu items in a submenu, you get a pretty popup of those items. For example, if you set a submenu with android:checkableBehavior="single&

I ran into some confusion recently styling some AutoCompleteTextViews. An AutoCompleteTextView is a compound View - it's got both an EditText component and a floating dropdown component. The former is rather straightforward to style, by the dropdown is difficult because it's a mixture of attributes on

There's a funny little timing problem I ran into recently I'd like to share regarding window size and split action bars. In an app I've got a loading screen that displays as we're making network requests. It's a cute SurfaceView

My company is in the process of converting our apps to use action bars, but we're not quite there yet. In the meantime, we've depended on the legacy overflow button on devices without a dedicated menu button: A problem has arisen because we've bumped