Now in Android #31
By: Chet Haase
Tags: articles on Medium, Now In Android, Android App Development, Android, Android Developers publication

Now in Android #31

Modern Android development content, documentation enhancements, AndroidX releases, articles, and a podcast episode

Welcome to Now in Android, your ongoing guide to what’s new and notable in the world of Android development.

Modern Android Development

Get Your #MADScore

In conjunction with the MAD Skills series, we wanted to have a little fun and offer an opportunity for you to answer that burning question: How MAD are you? To find out, install and run the MAD Scorecard plugin in Android Studio. It creates a card for you, showing how well your app scores in the four pillars of modern Android development, which you can then share to Twitter with the #MADscore hashtag.

Go to the MAD Score site to get the details, or check out more about it on Christopher Katsaros’s blog:

MAD Skills: Material Design Components

Meanwhile, the MAD Skills series continues to roll on, with technical content about modern Android development. Last week, the series on Material Design Components finished up. Since the last Now in Android, the team posted 3 more episodes:

#4: Material Motion

In the fourth MDC episode, Nick Rout talks about the four patterns of motion in Material and how to implement them in your applications. He walks through the Reply sample app, and a codelab based on that app, to show how it works in practice.

#5 Community Tip from Zarah Dominguez

The fifth MDC episode came to us from Zarah Dominguez, a Google Developer Expert, who talks about how her team uses the Material catalog app, both to see how things look in practice and what the source code looks like as an example of how to implement them.

#6: Live Q&A

The final MDC episode was, just like the previous series on App Bundles and Navigation, a live Q&A with MDC experts on the developer relations and material engineering teams. We got lots of questions from you on Twitter and in real time on YouTube during the Q&A. We didn’t have time to answer all of them, but we make… material progress.

If you missed any of the content in the MDC series, Nick Rout wrote up a summary of the series in this wrap-up article, with links to all of the relevant videos and articles, along with associated samples, doces, codelabs, and more.

MAD Skills: Kotlin and Jetpack

This week, there’s a new MAD Skills series on Kotlin and Jetpack. Specifically, it’s about how to use Kotlin in conjunction with many of the Jetpack APIs. Florina Muntenescu introduced it thusly:

#1: Using KTX

The first episode in the series is on using KTX, the Kotlin extensions we offer which provide improved, simpler approaches for various platform and Jetpack libraries. Florina discusses KTX in general, with examples in both platform and Jetpack APIs, showing how she uses them when using LiveData and ViewModel.

Or in article form:

#2: Simplifying APIs with Coroutines

In this second episode, Manuel Vivo explains how to use Kotlin coroutines to improve the experience of using existing APIs for Kotlin developers. For example, you can create adapters that simplify the complexity of nested callbacks with coroutines. He works through an example of creating a simpler API for Fused Location Provider to show how to do this in practice.

Or in article form:

Look for more Kotlin/Jetpack episodes in the next few weeks, which will show up both on the YouTube playlist as well as in article form in the Android Developers publication.

For ongoing content, be sure to check the MAD Skills playlist on YouTube, the articles on Medium, or this handy landing page that points to all of it.