Medium Archives - aster.cloud

6 min

Faster Jetpack Compose View Interop With App Startup And Baseline Profile

Jetpack Compose is designed to be interoperable with an existing View-based app. This enables you to take an incremental approach to migrating your existing app’s UI to Compose. While your app is in the middle of migration, and doesn’t yet have a Composable on the home or landing screen, users might notice jank when they navigate to a screen built with Compose. This is because the Compose library is loaded only when it is used for the first time. There is one workaround that has been floating around to add a Composable pixel on the home/landing screen. This workaround ensures that Compose components are warmed…

5 min

Programming

Compose Tooling

Compose allows you to build beautiful UIs quickly. Together with the Android Studio tooling support, you’re able to accelerate the development process even further with faster iteration and better debugging. So far we’ve looked at how to implement a single answer option in Jetsurvey, one of our Compose samples (previous article). Let’s see how Android Studio can help us write this efficiently. If you’ve got any questions so far from this series on Compose Basics, we will have a live Q&A session on October 13th. Leave a comment here, on YouTube, or using #MADCompose on Twitter to ask your questions. You can…

7 min

Compose Toolkit

In the previous MAD Skills Compose Basics article, you learned about the building blocks of UI in Compose: composable functions. Now, it’s time to learn about the powerful toolkit of UI components that ship with Compose enabling you to build rich UIs and interactions. If you’ve got any questions so far from this series on Compose Basics, we will have a live Q&A session on October 13th. Leave a comment here, on YouTube, or using #MADCompose on Twitter to ask your questions. So far we’ve looked at how to build a portion of the single choice question screen in Jetsurvey, one…

6 min

Migrating The AOSP QuickSearchBox App To Kotlin

Overview For the past three years, the Android Open Source Project (AOSP) applications team has taken on the task of converting AOSP apps from Java to Kotlin. This pursuit was begun as part of Android’s commitment to increasingly develop with Kotlin-first. Kotlin is a safe, pragmatic, and concise language, with a number of language-specific advantages. Useful Kotlin language features include: Null Safety: Kotlin types are non-nullable unless explicitly specified. This is incredibly useful for developers in avoiding difficult to trace null-pointer exceptions. Conciseness: Kotlin allows developers to reduce the amount of boilerplate code, expressing more with less lines of code compared to Java.…

8 min

Programming

Composable Functions

In the previous MAD Skills Compose Basics article, you learned how to think in Compose — you describe your UI in Kotlin as functions. No more XML needed! In this article, we will dive deeper into these functions and how you can build UI with them. As a reminder, we will be answering your questions on Compose Basics in our live Q&A session on October 13th. Make sure to leave a comment here, on YouTube, or by using the #MADCompose hashtag on Twitter. To understand how these functions work, let’s see how we can build the single choice question screen of Jetsurvey,…

8 min

Deep Links Crash Course : Part 3 Troubleshooting Your Deep Links

Introduction What do you do when your Android App Links don’t work the way you want them to? There are many tools available from Google to help you, such as the Play Console Deep Links page which gives you a single place to view and resolve many common issues with App Links. After being notified of an issue in the Play Console, you can follow these steps to debug your Android App Links. This blog post will walk you through debugging deep links in an application using adb, inspect your Digital Asset Link files using curl, and demonstrate how to handle user…

4 min

Jetpack Compose: Debugging Recomposition

In this post, I wanted to show you how I looked into a performance issue in Jetsnack and how I went about debugging and fixing it in Jetpack Compose. This post is available as a video as well if you prefer. Let’s get started by looking at the Jetsnack sample. The details screen has a fancy collapsing toolbar effect, where as we scroll up the content moves up and resizes and as we scroll back down the content returns to how it started. We’ve had reports that on lower-end devices this can appear quite janky as it scrolls. So, let’s look into…

8 min

The Deep Links Crash Course, Part 1: Introduction To Deep Links

I welcome you to the first installment of the deep links crash course series, where we’ll show a bit of context on what is a link, then we’ll go over each type of deep link, and, at the end, we’ll discuss some security notes. A summarized version is also available in video form. Otherwise, let’s get started! Introduction The deep links ecosystem is filled with lots of information and use cases. Nevertheless, you might be interested in just the basics of deep links, like “What can you do with them?”, “What is a deep link?”, “What is a link?”, “Who…

5 min

Programming

Get Familiar With Wear OS 3 (Without A Physical Device)

Wear OS has changed a lot over the last 8 years. It’s snappier, more efficient and includes a variety of UI surfaces for which you can develop. While strapping a physical device to your wrist for a few days is really the best way to get a feel for what the platform is like nowadays, it’s not the only way. The Wear OS 3 system image is available as a preview in Android Studio so, while we wait for our new watches to be delivered 😉, we can still take a quick tour. In this article, we’ll take a brief look at unique UI…

8 min

Programming

Jetpack Compose Interop: Using Compose In A RecyclerView

TL;DR RecyclerView 1.3.0-alpha02 and Compose UI 1.2.0-beta02 bring out-of-the-box performant usage of composables from RecyclerView — no extra code required! If you had previously implemented our guidance for Compose in RecyclerView, you should now remove this code. Introducing Compose incrementally in your codebase means that you can end up in the situation when you’re using composables as items in a RecyclerView. Before Compose UI version 1.2.0-beta02, the underlying composition of a ComposeView disposes when the view detaches from the window. However, in the context of a RecyclerView, items continually detach/attach from the window as they move off/on screen. Having to dispose and recreate compositions repeatedly is expensive and…

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