Wednesday, January 28, 2015

Android Development: Lotsa Links

This is meant to be a living archive of Android presentations, articles, videos, whatever that I've presented, co-presented, written, been a witness to, or simply enjoyed and learned from. People ask for this stuff occasionally ("Where can I learn more about performance tuning on Android?" or "Where can I see more videos of Romain? He's so dreamy, with that almost-real French accent!"), so I thought it would be worth recording the links somewhere where I can add new ones over time as stuff comes online (and delete old ones as they become obsolete).

I'll attempt to categorize things, but there is overlap on these topics. So the studious developer will, of course, watch and read everything. Twice.

The links are presented in rough reverse-chronological order in each section. Some talks date way back to 2010, but they're still relevant today (the advantage of APIs that don't go away...).

General Android Development

Android Developers Backstage (Tor Norbye, Chet Haase, and guests)
Tor and I interview other Android developers to talk about whatever it is that they do to help developers better understand how that stuff works.

Performance

Android Performance Workshop, Part 1 (Devoxx 2013) (Romain Guy & Chet Haase)
This presentation is all about memory on Android: how the system works, things to think about to avoid garbage collection, and tools to use to help detect and debug problems.

Android Performance Workshop, Part 2 (Devoxx 2013) (Romain Guy & Chet Haase)
This talk covers some platform improvements, performance tips, and case studies of chasing and fixing performance issues.

Android Graphics Performance (Google I/O 2013) (Romain Guy & Chet Haase)
More performance tips with demos of using the tools to find and fix problems.

Android Performance Case Study (Romain Guy)
This article from Romain shows how he used many of Android's performance tools to debug performance issues like overdraw on a real world app.

For Butter or Worse (Google I/O 2012) (Romain Guy & Chet Haase)
Romain and I discussed the graphics architecture of Android, along with various tips for achieving better performance.

Important Android Stuff, Part 2 (Devoxx 2012) (Romain Guy & Chet Haase)
More performance tips, more tools usage, more finding and fixing performance problems. More, more, more.

Android Tools (Devoxx 2011) (Romain Guy & Chet Haase)
A talk about some of the tools and techniques used for finding and fixing performance problems.

Android Performance Patterns (Colt McAnlis)
This series of videos from Colt helps you understand how things work and what you need to know to write better performing Android apps.

Graphics & Animation

Material Design (Devoxx 2014 keynote) (Nick Butcher & Chet Haase)
This talk is a combination of the design underpinnings of Material Design and some the platform API details for writing Material Design applications on both Android and Polymer.

Material Witness (Devoxx 2014) (Romain Guy & Chet Haase)
A talk about some of the Material Design APIs and techniques in the Android 5.0 Lollipop release, showing how they are used in a couple of sample applications.
This talk overlaps with a talk by the same name at Google I/O 2014, but this version is updated to the final APIs (the Google I/O talk was based on the APIs in the L Developer Preview release).

Material Science (Google I/O 2014) (Adam Powell & Chet Haase)
This is a talk on writing Material Design applications. Some of the API details have changed since this presentation, since it was based on the L Developer Preview release, but the underlying ideas of developing for Material Design is the same.

Important Android Stuff, Part 1 (Devoxx 2012) (Romain Guy & Chet Haase)
An overview of the Animation APIs, both pre-3.0 (the android.view.animation classes) and post-3.0 (the android.animation classes, Object Animator, etc.).

Curved Motion in Android (Chet Haase)
New APIs in Android 5.0 Lollipop make this much easier (and built into the platform), but this article explains how to use ObjectAnimator and TypeEvaluator to make your animations curve on earlier releases.

Android Graphics and Animation (Devoxx 2010) (Romain Guy & Chet Haase)
Romain and I talk about the general process of rendering Views on Android, graphics APIs for achieving various graphical effects, and the pre-3.0 Animation APIs.

Dive Into Android, Part 1 (Devoxx 2010) (Romain Guy)
Romain talks about the broader concepts of layout on Android, and the various built-in layout classes to use. He then steps through an example of creating a simple custom layout, to explain the process of measurement and layout that such a subclass must handle.

Dive Into Android, Part 2 (Devoxx 2010) (Romain Guy & Chet Haase)
Tips and techniques for creating graphical effects in Android applications.

Writing Custom Views for Android (Google I/O 2013) (Romain Guy & Adam Powell)
Romain and Adam Powell talk about custom views.

Stick GUIs (Romain Guy & Chet Haase)
Romain and I talk about various rich graphical effects for Android applications.

Android's Font Renderer (Romain Guy)
Romain's article about how Android renders text using the GPU.

DevBytes (Chet Haase & many others)
It's definitely worth checking out the DevBytes playlist. The content there is diverse, but it's clear to tell from the title whether it's something that you're interested in, and they all provide a quick deep dive into their topic of choice. There are a bunch of videos specific to animation and graphical effects, but there are many more videos on a wide range of Android topics.