New tablet UI for Firefox on Android
The new tablet UI for Firefox on Android is now available on Nightly and, soon, Aurora! Here’s a quick overview of the design goals, development process, and implementation.
Lucas Rocha
Lucas Rocha's personal website.
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Joining Facebook
I am really excited to announce that I’m joining Facebook in January! I’ll be bootstrapping Android UI efforts—frameworks and user-facing stuff—in the London office. There are still a lot of details to sort out but that’s the general plan.
Leaving Mozilla
I joined Mozilla 3 years, 4 months, and 6 days ago. Time flies!
Probing with Gradle
Up until now, Probe relied on dynamic view proxies generated at runtime to intercept View calls. Although very convenient, this approach greatly affects the time to inflate your layouts—which limits the number of use cases for the library, especially in more complex apps.
New Features in Picasso
I’ve always been a big fan of Picasso, the Android image loading library by the Square folks. It provides some powerful features with a rather simple API.
Introducing Probe
We’ve all heard of the best practices regarding layouts on Android: keep your view tree as simple as possible, avoid multi-pass layouts high up in the hierarchy, etc. But the truth is, it’s pretty hard to see what’s actually going on in your view tree in each UI traversal (measure → layout → draw).
Introducing dspec
With all the recent focus on baseline grids, keylines, and spacing markers from Android’s material design, I found myself wondering how I could make it easier to check the correctness of my Android UI implementation against the intended spec.
The new TwoWayView
What if writing custom view recycling layouts was a lot simpler? This question stuck in my mind since I started writing Android apps a few years ago.
Custom Layouts on Android
If you ever built an Android app, you have definitely used some of the built-in layouts available in the platform—RelativeLayout, LinearLayout, FrameLayout, etc. They are our bread and butter for building Android UIs.
How Android Transitions Work
One of the biggest highlights of the Android KitKat release was the new Transitions framework which provides a very convenient API to animate UIs between different states.