I’ve been using ant to build my Android projects for as long as I can remember. There are many reasons for this, like build consistency and workstation agnosticism, but you can read this article if you want to check that out. Ant is a good tool, but never offered the flexibility that I would have liked in a project. That’s where Gradle steps in. After seeing all of the power of the new Gradle build system, I knew I had to convert Hashnote to Gradle.

Back in April I had the pleasure of seeing a talk by Jay Ohms of TwentyFive Squares at GDG Schaumburg. It was a great discussion about their app, Press, an excellent RSS reader for Android. The discussion wasn’t a technical one, but one of the things that interested me was their decision to go Ice Cream Sandwich and up for Press. This was the first app that I had heard of, and the only major, popular app that I know of, that has made this decision.

Who Needs IDEs? At Google I/O this year, Google introduced it’s new IDE, Android Studio. Android Studio is based on IntelliJ IDEA, a great IDE that many of my Android friends use. I wasn’t particularly excited by this announcement because, for the last several years, I’ve given up IDEs. My development environment of choice has been Sublime Text 2 and ant. Sure, IDEs can be extremely useful, especially in Java, where boiler plate code is the name of the game.

Last week hosted the latest iteration of Google’s annual developer conference, Google I/O. Google I/O is where developers and enthusiasts go to get all of the latest news about Google’s latest offerings, from Android to Chrome to their Cloud backend. For the last two years, I was one of those developers that got to spend a few days a year with many other extremely brilliant people and learn a ton about new technologies.

In January of 2013, I finally decided to make the leap and start my own consulting business. It’s only been 3 months since then, but I’ve already learned quite a lot from the experience. After reading a recent article on Inc.com I couldn’t help but feel a little offended and reflective on my own experience in the workforce. One thing that I’ve come to realize is how much more productive I feel now that I’m working for myself.

There are a lot of great apps on mobile devices these days, made by a lot of great people. Many, if not most, of these apps use various open source libraries for features or backwards compatibility. This is excellent, but we have to make sure that we give credit where credit is due. Open Source is Great I have always been a big proponent of open source. Not just software, either.

The Android APIs are filled with things that don’t quite seem right. I’ve always been annoyed by the lack of relationship between interface elements. For instance, isn’t a ListView really just a special case of a GridView with only one column? Yet GridView and ListView aren’t directly related, so we get oddities where I can add header and footer views to a ListView, but not a GridView. One thing that seems to trip people up is the Button class.

Fragment are a great addition to Android. They allow reusability of sections of your views at the controller layer, and they also provide better encapsulation of your app’s logic. This can really help developers speed up code development and also keep their code clean, which makes it easier to maintain. All of these benefits are available if you follow a few guidelines when developing your code. One of the biggest mistakes that I see developers make, particularly those coming from other platforms, is casting the parent activity.