Udi Cohen's blog
Watching TV is one of my favorite activities, but I noticed it’s become too easy for kids (and adults) to fall into the endless loop of short, addictive YouTube videos instead of enjoying a thoughtful episode of a TV show or diving into an adventure movie. I got tired of seeing my kids glued to the screen watching yet another YouTuber attempt a ridiculous “Fast-Food Challenge.” So I decided to…
These past few months I spent mostly at home, as everyone else, and decided to take on a project to improve my time there. With three kids at our cozy apartment, it’s no wonder I loved spending a lot of time on our balcony. While I like the breeze and the view, I hated lowering and raising the sun shade. It’s a heavy shade, so it took more effort and time to operate than a regular bedroom window…
UPDATE (09/2020): While I discontinued working on Grabag, this might still worth the read as the idea still lives on. To this day, I keep seeing this type of product being requested by people. About a year ago, I cut the cords and canceled my cable subscription. I watch a lot of TV shows, but I stream everything anyway, and avoiding all the commercial breaks is a bliss. But there was one thing I…
A few weeks ago, I gave a talk about Android Performance Optimization, at Droidcon NYC. I invested a lot of time in this presentation, since I wanted to show real examples for performance issues, and how to identify them with the available tools. I had to cut down about a half of my slides because I didn’t have enough time to show everything. In this post, I’ll summarize everything I was talking…
After several years of using Wordpress.com for my blog - I decided I need a change. I wanted to move to something different for a while, but kept postponing it because that would require some time and effort to do. In this post, I’ll summarize my transition experience and elaborate on problems I had and how I solved them. Hopefully, this information will help others with similar ambitions. First…
The AOSP codebase in big. Developing on the AOSP is not as simple as writing an app, where you execute a nice gradle target and poof! you see it on the device. So far in this series, we discussed how to get the AOSP code into our environment , and how to build this code into a sweet flashable Android image files . We can now fill in the missing piece – how to efficiently develop for such an…
On the previous post , we got the AOSP code into our environment and learned how that process works. The _repo _tool and the Manifest project goes hand-in-hand, managing the 200+ git repositories, all part of the AOSP. Now that we have all the code locally, we need to get all those lines of code into a nice package we can eventually install on a device. The nice guys in Google brought us some nice…
6 months ago, I moved to New York , the first city I lived in outside of Israel. With a new job at a new place, I decided to also try a new laptop running a new platform - Mac OS. I always used Windows before that. I have used Linux as a VM and on servers I worked on, but as a primary OS - I sticked with Windows (with no particular reason). After many recommendations, I decided to give Mac its big…
Last week, Romain Guy posted about Optimizing hardware layers . He explained how hardware layers are a great way to boost the performance of your animations, but can also degrade it. When your view is backed by a hardware layer, that layer will get updated every time the view itself will update, and after that the layer will be drawn to the screen. Meaning, if your view is altered during an…
On my last post on the subject, Write your own Android Authenticator , we embarked on a journey to the unfamiliar part of authentication on Android. I received many positive responses about it from you all, and it seems I really helped a lot of people to get to know this feature well. Since then, I had a lot of stuff going on in my life (getting married is one of them) which delayed the release of…