Kyle Lehman kyhule

Correct localization on Android 7

Prior to Android 7, the system had a single preferred locale, and fallback behavior was quite rudimentary. Starting with Android 7, the user can now specify a priority list of locales, and fallback behavior is improved.

However, in many cases it is still surprisingly difficult to make full use of locale fallback, and there are some hidden gotchas when trying to fully support both Android 7 and earlier versions.

Don't use VPN services.

No, seriously, don't. You're probably reading this because you've asked what VPN service to use, and this is the answer.

Note: The content in this post does not apply to using VPN for their intended purpose; that is, as a virtual private (internal) network. It only applies to using it as a glorified proxy, which is what every third-party "VPN provider" does.

A Russian translation of this article can be found here, contributed by Timur Demin.
A Turkish translation can be found here, contributed by agyild.
There's also this article about VPN services, which is honestly better written (and has more cat pictures!) than my article.

Android Cheat Sheet

Developer tips

Record a video of your app

Developer options -> Check show touches
adb shell screenrecord /sdcard/video.mp4
adb pull /sdcard/video.mp4

How to create custom button styles using Android's AppCompat-v7:21

Introduction

AppCompat is an Android support library to provide backwards-compatible functionality for Material design patterns. It currently comes bundled with a set of styles in the Theme.AppCompat and Widget.AppCompat namespaces. However, there is a critical component missing which I would have thought essential to provide the a default from which we could inherit our styles: Widget.AppCompat.Button. Sure, there's Widget.AppCompat.Light.ActionButton, but that doesn't actually inherit from Widget.ActionButton, which does not inherit from Widget.Button, so we might get some unexpected behavior using that as our base button style, mainly because Widget.ActionButton strictly belongs in the ActionBar.

So, if we want to have a decently normal default button style related to AppCompat, we need to make it ourselves. Let's start by digging into the Android SDK to see how it's doing default styles.

Digging In


	fun Any?.toIndentString(): String {
	val notFancy = toString()
	return buildString(notFancy.length) {
	var indent = 0
	fun StringBuilder.line() {
	appendln()
	repeat(2 * indent) { append(' ') }
	}

	alias ls='ls -a -G'
	alias ll='ls -l'

	# adb commands targeted at specific devices without having to remember the device string
	alias adbm='adb -s TA989069LK'
	alias adbn='adb -s HT4CTJT01433'
	alias adbs='adb -s 1a138b5e'

	# copy prefs from an xml file to the device, save some of the settings setup work
	function cpPrefs {

	package be.brol

	import android.os.Binder
	import android.os.Bundle
	import android.support.v4.app.BundleCompat
	import android.support.v4.app.Fragment

	/**
	* Eases the Fragment.newInstance ceremony by marking the fragment's args with this delegate
	* Just write the property in newInstance and read it like any other property after the fragment has been created

	private fun <K, V> Map<K, V>.mergeReduce(other: Map<K, V>, reduce: (V, V) -> V = { a, b -> b }): Map<K, V> {
	val result = LinkedHashMap<K, V>(this.size() + other.size())
	result.putAll(this)
	other.forEach { e ->
	val existing = result[e.key]

	if (existing == null) {
	result[e.key] = e.value
	}
	else {

	#!/bin/bash

	echo ""

	echo "`date`: RUNNING: brew update"
	/usr/local/bin/brew update
	echo "`date`: FINISHED: brew update"

	echo ""