Noteworthy Features/ APIs I See In The Android O Preview

The developer preview of Android O has been announced yesterday. Here’s my take on it.

Benefitting users:

1. Auto sizing TextView :
TextView size will be adjusted based on the size of the bound layout. We can give minSize and maxSize. If the text is longer than the bounds, instead of cutting the text at the end, the system will reduce the size of TextView until the minSize.

2. Pinning Shortcuts and Widgets :
APIs are introduced to pin the shortcuts and widgets in the home launcher screen. Requires user to approve of it.

3. Auto filling framework:
Auto filling of the form fields to save the user from re-typing contents.

Benefitting Developers:

4. Fonts in xml:
Instead of bundling fonts as assets, it can be added as a resource in res/font. We can use the font in xml, set as fontFamily to TextView, preview the font in the editor.

5. Java 8 APIs:
java.time APIs and few other Java 8 APIs are added. Everyone would have heard about the deprecation of Jack toolchain last week.

6. Content Provider Paging:
Accessing the data from the database with pagination support, to query a subset of data from a huge database.

7. Generic findViewById() :
We don’t have to cast views after findViewById() anymore. Yay!