Erik Hellman - Hellsoft

Your guide to foreground services on Android

Android foreground services are difficult to get right. In this post, I'll explain the restrictions and what you need to do to get them working properly.

Android

Implementing Server-Sent Events with Spring Boot and Android

With HTTP/2 we can no longer use Web Sockets, so when we need to push data to the client from the server we need an alternative way. This is where Server-Sent Events come in. In this post, I will show how to implement it both in the backend, using Spring Boot, and on an Android client.

Bluetooth LE for modern Android Development - part 3

This is the final part of my new series on Bluetooth Low Energy for Android. It took much longer to complete this post than I expected, much because I rewrote parts of the code I show here when I found a better solution. In my last two [https://www.hellsoft.

BLE

Bluetooth LE for modern Android Development - part 2

In the previous post, I introduced the three major BLE-related news that came with Android 8.0. As that version was released in August 2017, I consider it safe to have Android 8.0 as the minSdkVersion today. The chance that you have a significant number of users on older

Android Featured

Bluetooth LE for modern Android Development - part 1

This post will be the first in a series where I aim to explain how to use the BLE APIs on Android to their full potential.

Android Featured

Profiling View performance on Android

I recently had a situation where I needed to change from LinearLayout to FlexboxLayout [https://github.com/google/flexbox-layout]. Before I could implement this change I needed to be sure we didn't make the UI slower in any way. In this post I'll describe the process for measuring the performance

Android Featured

Rendering Markdown with Jetpack Compose

Most developers are familiar with the Markdown format. We use it for simple README files in our git repos or for writing blog posts. It's a powerful and yet simple format that allows us to write documents with rich text formatting, without the need for an advanced word editor. The

Developers Featured

Bike-shedding, or the Law of Triviality

A city council is presented with the plans for a new nuclear power plant and needs to make some decisions on some details left open by the planners. These details can span from highly technical to very trivial, like the specifications for the nuclear reactor to the colour and material

Android Featured

Break up the app stores

It is time to break up the monopolies of Apple App Store and Google Play Store.

Developers Featured

There's no shortage of developers!

Large companies that keep growing is a bad thing. It stifles the possibilities of new businesses in the same area and it keeps worker from being productive.

Android Featured

Instant Search with Kotlin Coroutines

A guide for implementing instant search in an Android application using Kotlin Coroutines, and how to write a test for it.

Android Featured

TextureView transforms on Android

How to implement and understand the TextureView transformation for getting the camera viewfinder correct on Android, without having full knowledge of complex computer graphics theory.

Android

KittyLog - A small logcat utility

A tiny and simple utility for Android logcat. Not intended for production use.

Networking Featured

Non-blocking I/O

In this post I'll explain what non-blocking I/O is, how you can use it, and when it might be useful. The code examples will be in Kotlin and running on the JVM, but the principles behind this would work regardless of programming language as this is usually supported through the kernel of your OS.

How to evaluate a software stack

How I try to predict the future in software technologies

How to Service on Android — part 3

How, when and when not to use the Android Service component in modern Android applications.

How to Service on Android — part 2

Starting and stopping of an Android service.

How to Service on Android — part 1

Common pitfalls when binding to an Android Service.

A tale of many Android threads

The main thread is crying

Loading local web content on Android

The Android widgets provided by Google gets more powerful every day. But regardless of how advanced they would become, sometimes we need to

Understanding CPU and I/O bound for asynchronous operations

Ever wondered what the cool kids mean when they talk about CPU-bound and I/O-bound thread pools? Read on to learn more.

Even smarter async with coroutine actors

In my previous post on coroutines for Android, I described how to create a small and simple DSL for performing a single asynchronous task…

Simple asynchronous loading with Kotlin Coroutines

One of the most challenging things in software development is anything that is asynchronous. Unfortunately, humans are really bad at…

Animations with ConstraintLayout and ConstraintSet

This morning I watched a great video with Sean McQuillan from Google about Keyframe Animations using ConstraintLayout and ConstraintSet. As…

A nice combination of RxJava and DiffUtil

If you are using RecyclerView and have stayed fairly up-to-date with the API changes, you are probably aware of the DiffUtil class that was…