Android

With my LifeCounter app for Magic The Gathering, I released my first Android app on the Google PlayStore over two years ago. Besides my first release, this was also another milestone for me: My first real app. Over two years later, I am proud to announce a completely revamped version of the app. Several complete revisions have taken place in the meantime and I’m already planning the next one, as I admittedly tried to learn the MVP pattern with the app and now, a few months later, I’m completely dissatisfied and want to switch to MVVM. But that doesn’t really matter at the moment. ...

It’s time to announce a new sideproject-launch! Some days ago, I’ve been looking for an app which allowed my to keep track of shopping lists in a simple and fast way. While there are lots of such apps available for Android, all I tested seemed to be overkill for what I really wanted. So I decided to create my own app for this purpose. Besides creating a simple app, my goal was to learn something new while developing the app. I decided to use Androids built in SQLite database to store lists. I’ve been using the database for previous projects, but I did not really care about the implementation. That being said, I wrote the queries all by hand which ended up being pretty messy. ...

Once again, it’s time to announce one of my side projects: Pefeggt - A boiling time calculator for eggs. Actually, I’ve been sitting on this one for quite a while and I decided to complete a working release this weekend. The app is built for Android and it helps you to calculate the perfect time you need to boil eggs to your preferred consistency. Functionality & Usage To calculate the time, I’m using Charles D. H. Williams formula from his paper “The Science of boiling an Egg”. This calculation requires the weight and temperature of the egg, the height above sea level at the place where it is cooked and the desired internal temperature of the egg to determine its consistency. ...

In the context of I/O 2017, Google released the Room Persistence Library, an intermediate layer between application logic and Android’s SQLite database. Using Room, you no longer have to handle stuff like network connection errors or caching yourself. Today’s article will help you get started with the library and teach you all the skills you need to implement Room in your own applications. Background of my sample application The following code snippets are part of one of my side projects. This application manages shopping lists, which in itself can have entries. Actually, this is a very simple application, but it illustrates the functionality of Room very well. ...

Traditionally, you were using a listview to display several homogeneous elements in you Android app. However, this view is now deprecated. Android now offers an alternative, which aims to increase performance by only loading those elements, that are currently rendered on-screen: the RecyclerView. This article shows you how to get started with the RecyclerView. To make things a bit more interesting, we will be using Kotlin instead of Java. You can set up an Android project for Kotlin by simply clicking the checkbox for Kotlin support in the new project wizard. ...