The state of Android Camera: Tap to Focus — Tap to Focus There’s no denying how satisfying it is when your camera magically knows what you’re pointing it at. But often it’s not quite right. So, we need the ability to focus the camera ourselves. On Android, this is conventionally done using a tap. …

How to use JAXB bindings with WSDL to separate schemas into different packages. — WSDL As discussed in my previous blog, WSDL is an XML format that describes network services. It defines endpoints and their request and response formats. WSDL files contain schemas to describe those request and response objects. A single WSDL file could contain multiple schemas. This is commonly used to share some…

How and where to define your user-facing strings. — Messages.properties You’ve probably already read about the messages.properties file. It allows you to define any strings you wish to present to an end-user. messages.properties: To retrieve one of these strings in code you first need to get a MessageSource. This is provided via spring dependency injection. Constructor injection: @Service //…

How to use JAXWS to generate HTTP client code using the Gradle Kotlin DSL. — WSDL WSDL (Web Services Description Language) is an XML format. It describes network services, their endpoints and the corresponding request and response formats. WSDL is commonly used in conjunction with a SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) API. Soap can be thought of as a way of structuring your API. …

Using the new and improved AnimatedVectorDrawable to pause and seek your animations. — AnimatedVectorDrawable Android SDK 21 introduced both the VectorDrawable and the AnimatedVectorDrawable. This allowed you to use vector assets within your app, and even animate them. They’ve iterated on these since then, but AnimatedVectorDrawable was still missing something. You couldn’t manipulate and control the animation. There was no pause or seek functionality.

Educating Android users can be subtle by using motion — Material Design The material design system will be familiar to most, as one of the most widely used design systems. It’s a visual language that represents good design principles whilst allowing expressive branding. Foundationally, it is based on the physics of the world. This makes it natural and familiar to users. …

How to implement certificate pinning in Kotlin Multiplatform using Ktor — Certificate Pinning Pinning certificates is a common practice when interacting with remote APIs. It is the act of constraining which certificates you trust. This helps to defend against attacks on certificate authorities. It also helps combat man-in-the-middle attacks. There is a multitude of information available about certificate pinning. …

How does Kotlin Multiplatform affect your development culture? — Kotlin Multiplatform Kotlin Multiplatform (KMP) is a way of writing cross-platform code in Kotlin. It is not about compiling all code for all platforms, and it doesn’t limit you to a subset of common APIs. KMP provides mechanisms for writing platform-specific implementations for a common API. Culture Culture is a big focus for…

How to write tests within Kotlin Multiplatform — Testing Code quality is very important, and testing is a huge part of code quality. You want to ensure the code you write behaves as expected. It also needs to work under a variety of conditions. I use the Given When Then approach to testing across all our Small, Medium and…