Android

I was asked to be a speaker during GDG DevFest 2015 conference in Warsaw, Poland. Of course, I accepted this invitation and prepared presentation titled “Reactive Live Coding”. Presentation covered basics of Reactive Programming, RxJava and RxAndroid. Besides my talk I’ve done live coding to show how to use mentioned libraries and basics principles of Reactive Programming in real life. I had only 20 minutes for all of that, so my time-box was very limited. Being a speaker at conference was really interesting and challenging experience, which I haven’t had before. Moreover, I could meet a lot of interesting people and hear very inspiring talks covering different topics. You can check activity from conference by browsing #devfest15pl hashtag on Twitter and Facebook event. You can also check official website of the conference at devfest.pl. Slides from my presentation are available below. ...

I’ve recently released version 1.4.0 of Kirai library. Kirai means phrase in Swahili language. It’s string formatting library written in Java. It originally started as an Android library, but it evolved to pure Java library. It’s first possibilities were basic string formatting and text formatting for Android TextViews. Now, it allows to format strings for Java, Web, Android and even Unix Terminal! Have you ever wanted to have colorful and styled text in your mobile app, website or terminal app? Now you can with an elegant and fluent API! Moreover, I’ve added test coverage supported by codecov.io. It’s really nice service, which integrates with Travis CI and is free for open-source projects. It’s available for various programming languages and build systems. Check library source code and samples at: https://github.com/pwittchen/kirai. ...

Introduction In the last days I prepared a bunch of updates in my open-source software for Android. Most of them are bug fixes and are related to increasing robustness of the projects as well as their overall quality. I also decided to play a little with Kotlin language from JetBrains, which seems to be reasonable choice for mobile applications running on Android. Nevertheless, writing an app in Kotlin requires some additional configuration and we should remember, it’s still in beta version. If you are interested in Kotlin programming for Android, take a look at Getting started with Android and Kotlin guide from official Kotlin website. You can also take a look at one of my sample apps written in Kotlin and its configuration in Gradle. ...

Recently, I’ve created yet another reactive library for Android. It’s called ReactiveBeacons and it’s responsible for observing BLE (Bluetooth Low Energy) beacons. Beacons are small devices, which became quite popular in the last years. They can be utilized in creating Contextual Awareness, Contextual Computing and Internet of Things. Beacons have lithium battery, are constantly turned on and emit signals via Bluetooth all the time. ReactiveBeacons library allows to transform these signals into Observable stream compatible with RxJava. Whenever new beacon is detected or RSSI (Received signal strength indication) changes, new immutable beacon data is emitted. ...

Another month, another library. Recently, I’ve released yet another reactive library called ReactiveSensors. It’s an open-source Android library monitoring hardware sensors with RxJava Observables. Library is compatible with RxJava 1.0.+ and RxAndroid 1.0.+ and uses them under the hood. Library is available at: https://github.com/pwittchen/ReactiveSensors. In my opinion, hardware sensors are perfect case for applying RxJava, because in fact we’re constantly receiving a stream of events emitted by many sensors. With Reactive Programming approach we have plenty of possibilities and easy API for manipulating received sensor’s data. ...