As a follow up to my article explaining how to create communication bridges in Android and iOS, I thought it might be a good idea to do the same for Flutter. While it may seem like this is a straightforward affair, you’ll soon realize it takes a bit of work to get this functionality working.
First and foremost, it is important to realize that (at the time of writing this article) Flutter does NOT have built in support for embedded WebViews. …
Getting started with Firebase on Android
When you go about to build an application, there are a ton of considerations to take into account. And those are all mainly concerned with the client part. When you start to think about the server of your application, things can get pretty complicated. One option to alleviate some of that pressure is to use Firebase, in particular, two features from Firebase:
- Authenticating users using Firebase Auth
- Storing data using a Realtime Database
We will show in this article :
If the title of this article means something to you, then you are probably aware of the earthquake caused by iOS14. For those that are unaware, following the release of iOS14, there are major changes in the way applications can gather information about the user. One major change deals with the IDFA and how applications can access it. In short, applications will now be required to show a dialog to the user, asking him/her if they allow the application to track them or not.
When you want to allow the users of your application to have the ability to enter text - you use the EditText component. This seemingly simple UI element has plenty of weird behaviors associated with it that are not so easy to overcome or anticipate. This article will cover some of them and present solutions.
We’ll start with the basics.
Designing an application tends to be cumbersome and more often than not, there is a whiteboard with arrows pointing from various points to others. What you initially thought would be an application with one or two activities, suddenly appears to have multiple flows, fragments and a wide range of user interaction. Wouldn’t it be nice then, if we could take whatever it is that is on that whiteboard and replicate it easily in code?
Say hello to the Navigation Component.
To the unfamiliar, the Navigation Component is not another UI class that you place instead of a layout for your activity/fragment. Think of it like a map, where instead of continents, you have your fragments, and you will need directions to get from continent to continent. It presents your fragments and the connections between them in a top down manner. In this article, we will go over the main aspects of this component and learn how we can integrate it into our applications. …
This seemingly simple UI element has a lot of hidden features. If you have ever developed an application, you probably have used it.
An AlertDialog’s main function is to notify users of something that is going to happen that requires their immediate attention and an action to be made on their end. The uses of an AlertDialog are numerous and could range from:
- Ask the user to grant permission for your application to do something (location)
- Alert the user to an action that is about to take place (remove photo)
- Notify the user of what is going on (feature not…
If you are a developer, you will likely relate to what I am about to say
When you are applying for a developer position, the trials and tribulations you have to go through are strenuous, to say the least. From sending in your resume, to the numerous stages of the interviewing process, to the fact that you may never hear why you got rejected. …
Every mobile developer has faced this scenario before: you have an application that is ready to be released, you got down all the MVP features that you want, you tested it on several devices.
You feel good to go.
Before you hit that publish button, one question still lingers in your mind:
What will happen to my users when I want to update my application?
You want to be sure that your users will have an option to update to the latest version of the application, with ease and simplicity. But, how do you do that? …
Make your Android app more reactive with data binding, done right
Data binding is a technique used when you want to glue together pieces of information (your data) to some visual user input elements. In this process, whenever the input gets updated, the data behind it gets updated as well. This is far from a new concept, and there are a plethora of frameworks that have incorporated this into their design (AngularJS/React/Vue). Our attention in this article is not on front-end frameworks but rather on a mobile setting. Google introduced the Data Binding Library in Android, which is part of Android Jetpack.
If you are unfamiliar with the Jetpack library suite, it might be because Google has announced that it will be dropping development for its support libraries and instead will move into supporting AndroidX libraries (which are the newer version of the support libraries). …
A certain shift of tides is happening within Medium. After publishing stories for a better part of a year on Medium, this change has made me look at Medium in a new perspective. Before, it was a platform that enabled me to read stories from various people and to reach a wide range of audiences with my writing. Now, my approach is a more cautious one and has made me question my future as a writer on Medium. You may have noticed this change or it may have slipped your eye, but there is something deep happening on Medium.
I’m a writer that focuses on tech related subjects and I publish my content on several publications, making it accessible to everyone (aka not behind Medium’s paywall). Why have I been feeling significantly discouraged about publishing more articles on Medium? This is due in part to a policy change in Medium that has major repercussions for writers similar to myself. Before we head into what I am considering to do and why, let’s take a step back and understand where things stand now. …
