30 new Android Libraries and Projects released in Summer 2017 which should catch your attention
The summer is over and this is a great time to present my subjective list of 30 Android libraries and projects released in the last 3 months. Some of them can be used in production, some of them definitely not, but playing with all of them will be pure fun. They are definitely worthy to check. Enjoy!
1. MaterialStepperView
This is a library which implements Steppers from Material Design Components.
Currently, there is only Vertical Stepper View but more styles will come in the future. You can check, how it looks below:
You can customise normal/active point colour, done icon, as well as enable animation and set its duration. To check it, please visit Set item values and styles on its Github.
This library supports API 17+ and has a quite comprehensive wiki available here.
This is an Android Library for multiple snapping of RecyclerView. MultiSnapRecyclerView easily provides a snapping feature to your RecyclerView.
Currently it offers:
- gravitated snapping to
start,
end
andcenter,
snap count
to specify a number of items to scroll over,- support for horizontal and vertical scrolling,
- listener to be called when snapped.
Below is the example, how to use the library.
This is a library that we can consider as a skeleton for creating layouts as presented below:
GarlandView
consists of classes for inner items that are scrolled vertically and outer items that are scrolled horizontally, and each of which contains one inner item.
Rest of the important information you can find in README. There is also an example app. The library supports API 19 and above.
This is a customised LayoutManager
— fade and shrink the head itemView when scrolling. It was inspired by this Dribble project.
The name of this library is self-explanatory. It is a expandable layout, based on LinearLayout
.
README contains all information you need to get started.
It is well-documented. In addition, there is an example app to quickly jump to the code.
6. SwipeBackLayout
SwipeBackLayout
is a library that can finish an Activity by using gestures.
You can set the slide direction, such as FROM_LEFT, FROM_TOP, FROM_RIGHT and FROM_BOTTOM.
You can also set whether it can only slide from the edge.
SwipeBackLayout
must contain only one direct child, such as:
LinearLayout
,RelativeLayout
,FrameLayout
,TableLayout
etc.ScrollView
,HorizontalScrollView
,NestedScrollView
etc.RecyclerView
, a subClass ofAbsListView
(ListView
etc.)ViewPager
,WebView
etc.
The project has a comprehensive documentation, sample app and an APK.
7. SmartCropper
This is a library for cropping image in a smart way that can identify the border and correct the cropped image. Applicable to ID cards, business cards, documents and other photos of the crop.
Features:
- Crop image in a smart way that can identify the border,
- support drag anchors, magnifying glass effect to enhance the positioning experience,
- use the perspective transform to crop and correct the selection to restore the front image,
- support rich UI settings, such as auxiliary lines, mask, anchor, magnifying glass and so on.
Currently, the library uses optimised points sorting algorithm. CropImageView
has selection magnifying effect and it can use CropImageView
XML
settings.
Date Range Picker is a Calendar Picker View to show a customised Date Range Picker with improved UI.
A description of the project is well-written and easy to read.
Everybody knows Stories which Facebook and Instagram presented on their apps. Here is a library which introduces StoriesProgressView
which extends LinearLayout
and allows you to add View like below:
The project contains a short but comprehensive README along with sample app.
10. CosmoCalendar
This library is a custom calendar which offers many features and UI modifications like:
- changing calendar orientation,
- setting custom text colours,
- setting selection types and colours,
- defining navigation buttons etc.,
- many more.
I hope everybody heard about Plaid app. This library developed by Shazam Engineering team, is a
port of Plaid’s ReflowText that allows easily transitioning between sibling TextViews — no matter their size or style.
The library is really easy to use, plug and play!
This is not a library, but a standalone Android app developed by Nick Butcher for experimenting with adaptive icons. According to the README:
This app finds all installed apps supporting an adaptive icon and displays them in a grid. It then allows you to toggle different mask shapes (approximating how the icon might display on different devices) and explore visual effects may be applied. Currently offered:
Layer translation parallax based on scroll
Layer scale parallax based on touch
13. Tivi
Tivi is an application which tracks TV shows and it is connected to Track.tv. It is developed by Chris Banes. The work is still in progress but what is important, it uses the cutting-edge components, libraries and tools which includes: Kotlin, RxJava 2, usage of all of the Architecture Components (Room, LiveData and Lifecycle-components) and usage of dagger-android for dependency injection.
14. RxIdler
This is an IdlingResource
for Espresso which wraps an RxJava Scheduler
developed by Square Engineering. It supports RxJava 1 and RxJava 2 as well. Happy Instrumentation testing!
15. MRichEditor
This is a rich text editor sample (based on summernote).
It supports many features, including: Bold, Italic, Underline, Strike-through, Headings (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6), Paragraph, Quote, (Un)Ordered List, Code, Horizontal Rule, Link, Image, Justify (Center, Fill, Left, Right), Subscript, Superscript, Font Name and Size, Indent, Outdent, Undo / Redo.
In this case you need to base on the sample app, as there is almost no documentation.
16. Android Clean Architecture Boilerplate
This is boilerplate app that shows a clean architecture approach to Android apps developed by Buffer team and Joe Birch.
Reasons for creating this boilerplate:
To experiment with modularisation.
To share some approaches to clean architecture.
To use as a starting point in future projects where clean architecture feels appropriate.
The project is written 100% in Kotlin with both UI and Unit tests.
It is really well-documented and great for education purposes! 100% recommendation.
17. RxJava2Debug
If you use RxJava, you know that sometimes it is difficult to read exceptions and find an issue in your Rx stream. And this is the reason why this library was created. You can read more about rational in README.
The library offers:
- stack trace generation,
- stack trace filtering.
18. Resizer
Resizer is a lightweight and easy-to-use Android library for image scaling. It allows you to resize an image file to a smaller or bigger one while keeping the aspect ratio.
The library is inspired by Compressor library.
The library specification:
Minimum SDK: API 21
Default settings:
targetLength: 1080
quality: 80
outputFormat: JPEG
outputDirPath: the external files directory of your app
Supported input formats:
BMP
GIF
JPEG
PNG
WEBP
Supported output formats:
JPEG
PNG
WEBP
Supported quality range: 0~100
The higher value, the better image quality but larger file size
PNG, which is a lossless format, will ignore the quality setting
19. FaceDetector
This library allows you to detect faces in real time on a camera preview. It greatly works with Fotoapparat library, but is supports also other camera libraries and sources.
The usage is simple and the project is quite well documented.
20. RxGps
This is another library from Florent Champigny. It easily finds a current location for us. It is RxJava2 compatible. It also automatically asks for GPS runtime permissions and checks if play services are available for you.
21. MapMe
MapMe is an Android library for working with Maps. MapMe brings the adapter pattern to Maps, simplifying the management of markers and annotations.
MapMe works with Google Maps and Mapbox. README is comprehensive and the library is written in Kotlin.
22. RevelyGradient
This is a library for an easy gradient management.
You can use it in Java or in Kotlin. Documentation is short but enough to start with ease.
23. LiteUtilities
This is a library written in Kotlin, which helps to eliminate boilerplate from your code. Currently it offers:
- RecyclerUtils — Remove the need to make an adapter everytime, set up recycler adapter in as little as 4 lines.
- ScrollUtils — Easily hide/show FloationActionButton on scroll when using RecyclerView or NestedScrollView.
- ToastUtils — Creating toasts are just a function away.
- SPUtils — Simple DSL for Shared Preferences.
- ValidatorUtils — Fast and simple text validation.
- LogUtils — Simple and easy android logging.
24. KOIN
KOIN is a dependency injection framework that uses Kotlin and its functional power to get things done!
According to the author, there is:
- No proxy/CGLib,
- No code generation,
- No introspection
Its documentation is really good, with examples and wiki. There are also contact information (even with Slack).
25. koptional
Minimalistic Optional type for Kotlin that tries to fit its null-safe type system as smooth as possible.
Rationale according to authors:
We don’t think that Kotlin itself needs
Optional
because it has strong null-safe type system that effectively eliminates need in such a wrapper. However there are APIs and libraries like RxJava 2 which don't acceptnull
values.We also think that in many cases you can use
sealed class
es to express absent values, however in simple cases like passingString?
through Rx streamOptional
is a more convenient solution.
For more go to their Github.
26. Parallax
This is an easy parallax View
for Android simulating Apple TV App Icons.
README is really good and worthy to check.
27. droid-vizu
Droid-vizu aims to provide customised visualisation effects by easily swapping Renderer to get cool effects
28. Drone
This is not the Android library but a library manager delivered by César Ferreira. It was written due to jealousy of the node.js community for their fast and reliable dependency managers. So instead of googling a library, checking it, reading docs etc., you just do:
drone add creator/library module
For instance:
drone add jakewharton/butterknife
The documentation is really good and this is really worthy to check.
29. From-design-to-Android-part2
This is a project covering creating neat UI on Android. This time, Saúl Molinero covers:
- using ShapeShifter tool by Alex Lockwood
AndroidVectorDrawables
,ScaleDrawables
,- Adaptive Icons and more.
It is a truly great lecture!
30. Reagent
Reagent is a Jake Wharton place for experiments for future reactive libraries. Should you use it? No.