Recently, I attended the Kotlin programming language conference, aptly named KotlinConf, to learn about the latest developments in the language. Naturally, my first idea for this blog was to list the top takeaways of the talks I attended. However, I thought it could be more useful for those who aren’t familiar with Kotlin yet to […]
Measure the Adequacy of Android Unit Tests with Mutation Testing
Unit tests are an essential tool in a trustworthy test suite for an Android application or any other software system for that matter. But unit tests themselves doesn’t guarantee that the right features or requirements are tested, even if you did a thorough effort to cover as much code as possible in your entire code […]
Recognizing commercials using the Alphonso API
Liberty Global organized the Hack & Play Appathon in Ziggo dome on September 15th and 16th. More than 20 teams of hackers, designers and programmers were invited to create an app or a game for the Liberty Global product Horizon set-top box. Team Trifork joined with Dennis de Goede (Design & Frontend), Tony Abidi (Devops) […]
RUNNING CUSTOM “LINT” CHECKS ON YOUR ANDROID BUILDS
In this post, I’ll share a very simple tip on how to add very simple custom checks of your Android source code to your Jenkins build server, but the tip should be very easily ported to other build servers too. What? Most developers know of Lint checks as something which perform some kind of static […]
Basic Android UI performance
The base of every good app is performance. No user is willing to use an app with subpar performance, especially not with the amount of apps on the Play Store and thereby possible alternatives. In this post, we will take a look at some of the basics of Android UI performance and some of the […]
Linking apps together with App Links
When developing apps for mobile phones you want to offer your users the best user experience. Sometimes this includes showing information outside of your app, in another app. Up until recently, there was no real good way to do this. Luckily, now there is a new initiative App Links that provides an open source and […]
Apportable (a much better alternative to Phonegap) and AFNetworking 2.0
On October 16th I attended CocoaHeads, an iOS developer meetup that is organized every few months by Peter Robinett of Bubble Foundry and other volunteers. Every time it’s hosted at a different location. It was previously hosted at Spil Games, Xebia and NOS. This time it was hosted at eBuddy. The formula is simple: great […]
Developing apps for the Pebble smart watch
In this blog I want to talk about Pebble. A watch that can connect to your smart phone (both iPhone and Android) via Bluetooth to do all sorts of cool stuff a regular watch can’t do. Among the cool things you can do with it is install apps, which you can write yourself. As a […]
Using Android Preferences in a background service
In this post I will explain how I have used the Android Preferences in a background service. The preference is used as an interval for updating a listview with some simple text items.
Android basics – Applying some UI patterns
When I started with my Android application, I had the idea to create a home screen and an action bar just like one of the Android developers described in a blog item. I was really helped by the source code of the Google I/O Schedule app. In this post I will explain how I used […]