This is part three of a series on refactoring themes and styles. Theme overlays are used to override values from your theme. At Monzo, we leverage theme overlays in different ways and this post highlights three cases where we’ve found using them to be helpful.
This is part two of a series on refactoring themes and styles. In this post, we’ll briefly cover what default styles are, how to use them, and why they belong (for the most part) in your base theme.
Last year, Nick Butcher and Chris Banes presented "Developing Themes with Style" at Droidcon Berlin. It was a welcome recap for themes and styles, as well as best practices for Android theming. We’ve been working to apply these best practices to the Android app at Monzo. For us, the challenge lay more in how we could make these changes safely, over time. In other words, how we can refactor our themes.
20 November 2019
A ContextThemeWrapper allows us to modify or overlay the theme of another context. Let’s have a look at how we’d do this, using an alert dialog as an example.
09 November 2019
Let’s use Connect 4 to visualise how Android theme overlays are applied, and the effect on attribute resolution.
28 October 2019
When a view is inflated from XML, where does Android look to determine the value of the view’s attributes? Let’s look at the places we can specify attributes and then go through an example with a custom view.
14 October 2019
The typical way to apply a theme overlay is using the `android:theme` attribute on our view. This post summarises how we can do this, as well as introducing `materialThemeOverlay`, a theme attribute that (kind of) lets us set a theme overlay on a default style.
09 May 2019
Exposing “hidden” actions to accessibility services used to require providing a custom AccessibilityDelegate or using a third-party library like Novoda’s accessibilitools. No longer! There’s a new API dropping in the latest version of AppCompat (1.1.0) which includes a handy way to serve this information to the system with minimum effort.
30 April 2019
This template includes some of things that you always forget when you’re writing a blog post. With this post, you’ll be able to copy and paste stuff. Be sure to remove the comments before publishing!
03 February 2019
This post demonstrates some ways we can improve our pull request process to add important information to help the reviewer understand our changes faster.
02 December 2018
Android App Links is a feature designed to reduce friction for users who want to access your content — instead of a user clicking an HTTP link and navigating to your website, Android will redirect them to the same content in your app, for a seamless transition to a native Android experience.
14 October 2018
This template includes some of things that you always forget when you’re writing a blog post. With this post, you’ll be able to copy and paste stuff. Be sure to remove the comments before publishing!
27 August 2018
I started a new project the other day where I’ll be using the Harvard Art Museums API to build a small app that demonstrates usages of (or rather helps me learn) instant apps, app links and deep links. I’ve been using Postman for a while to explore and document REST APIs. I really like that it saves the requests we make, and that we can group them into collections.
When you start learning about accessibility on Android, it won’t be long before you come across Accessibility Services. These are special apps on Android that help the user interact with their device where some help the user consume information and others help perform actions.
Kotlin lets us define custom behaviour for operators (e.g. +, ==or *). We can add mathematical or logical semantics for how operators behave with various types. We can either implement these behaviours in a class as a member function (handy for classes that we own), or externally, as an extension function (for types outside of our control).
Kotlin lets us define custom behaviour for operators (e.g. +, ==or *). We can add mathematical or logical semantics for how operators behave with various types. We can either implement these behaviours in a class as a member function (handy for classes that we own), or externally, as an extension function (for types outside of our control).
20 July 2018
Kotlin’s when works similarly to Java’s switch. Once upon a time, I heard that when forces you to specify all the branches (when all the branches can be known by the compiler, with enums or sealed-classes), but I didn’t find this to be the case.
This year, I started looking for a new role where I could work on Android stuff. I wanted to work on something that I used every day, alongside people who are (or want to be) involved with the Android community.
The past two years have seen a lot more interest for inclusive design in the Android community. This post is a hands-on, practical introduction to accessibility on Android.
29 March 2018
Someone asked me the other day how accessibility services behave if you use a single TextView with multiple spans, instead of multiple TextViews. I didn’t know, so I tried doing it.
16 February 2018
I gave a presentation at MOBOS conference in Cluj-Napoca, Romania this week. It was based off some work I did last year, but have since added a lot of new features. The slides didn’t have any text, so here’s a summary of what I presented.