Posts

Tried the Android L preview SDK? You may have noticed a new support library called Palette.

If you haven’t seen Philm yet, it is a movie collection and information app that I created for Android. It uses the Trakt and TMDB APIs.

If you start manually drawing things to Android’s Canvas, you will probably start to draw text as well.

Carrying on from the previous post, we now have the palette of colours which make up our chosen image. The palette can be retrieved by calling getQuantizedColors() on our MedianCutQuantizer. We could just sort this array based on the count and job done, use the colours in descending order. Unfortunately it turns out that most images use a lot of two colours: white and black (or close shades), hardly the colours to make your app stand out. This means that we need to think a bit more about which colours to pick out.

Just a quick post. You may have noticed that this site has changed yet again. After my ‘Color Matching’ post last week, I saw quite a few comments saying that the site was slow.

Android 4.4 introduced more subtle use of colour throughout the OS and provided new guidance on using colour in your applications to provide better branding (see this episode of ADiA for more discussion). This means that the onus is now on you as a designer/developer to inject some colour into your app to make it stand out.

Over the past few months I’ve been receiving a ton of emails, tweets, G+ mentions and GitHub issues in connection with my open source libraries. So I thought I would set out what my plan is for them in the future, and the order in which I’ll be tackling the backlog.

Over the past few weeks I’ve been updating ActionBar-PullToRefresh for the release of v0.7, but have been a bit blocked on publishing the library as an Android Archive (aar) to Maven Central. It was the number one issue/request that I received, and while I had a working local Gradle build I could not find an easy way to publish the results.

So this is my first blog post on ActionBar-PullToRefresh. I’ve been mainly talking about it on Google+ up until now as it simply was not ready for production use. Well today I tagged and push v0.4 of the project, which adds the main missing feature: automatically styling based on your Action Bar style.

One of things that I keep finding myself doing is creating copyright profiles in IntelliJ for my open source projects. If I move to a new machine, I have to do it all over again. So I thought I’d write a quick blog post, more for my reference than anything but hopefully you’ll find it helpful too.