Fix the display of the toolbar in Android Studio

From time to time I get this really nasty bug where the toolbar in Android Studio is aligned to the start of the screen. I mean the part where you select the device and press Run, for some reason sometimes just moves to the left and bringing it back to the right is a bit of a pain. Also if you hide the main navigation toolbar by accident, then it is really hard to bring it back. Here is the solution: ...

September 28, 2021 · 1 min · gmirchev90

Android Studio Arctic Fox not building a signed APK

Generating a signed build using Android Studio Arctic Fox version 2021.3.1 seem to be a tricky thing to do. I spent several hours just to figure out where the issue is and at the end, I still don’t know what is the exact reason for signing to not work.

August 17, 2021 · 2 min · gmirchev90
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Creating a bottom sheet dialog with rounded corners and expanding it to full screen

Sometimes even simple and easy stuff can be complex on Android. Such is the case where you want to have a bottom sheet dialog with rounded corners which expands to fullscreen. Here is how I did it on Android 6.

July 5, 2021 · 2 min · gmirchev90
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Why integration of Google Cast alongside Exoplayer really sucks?

Recently I played around with the integration of Google Cast inside Exoplayer and I was really amazed to see how bad it is and how much it sucks. I decided to write this post with the idea it will help someone else who is also struggling with the Google Cast integration for exoplayer. Requirements So the requirements I had for the integration of Google Cast are quite simple: Play an item on cast Play a list of items - when you press Next you go to the next item Forward / Backwards with 30 seconds - so you can skip through the track Play / Pause support Switch between lists of items - you can player item 2 of List A, you should be able to switch to item 3 of List B Switch between phone playback and cast playback - switch from cast to app and from app to cast Update the progress when casting - time elapsed should also be updated Volume up/down are supported

June 11, 2021 · 5 min · gmirchev90

Migration from Gson to Moshi - small tricky parts

Gson is outdated a bit with the last commit done quite some time ago. We also had implemented the Moshi library in our Gradle dependencies and these are the 2 reasons why we decided to move away from GSON.

April 4, 2021 · 2 min · gmirchev90

Publishing a private Android library

Recently I played around with a library that is used in multiple projects. This library has a huge list of dependencies like: coroutines, rxjava, navigation library from Google, material library, custom edit texts that come from 3rd party libraries and many more. Basically this library has also a rich set of screens available to the users that open given certain conditions. But our issues was bigger.

April 4, 2021 · 6 min · gmirchev90

When can RxJava become a pain in the ass?

The idea of this post is really simple. If you don’t know the details around RxJava - don’t implement it in a project which has the idea of earning money.

February 13, 2021 · 6 min · gmirchev90

Detecting network change with ConnectivityManager & RxJava

Wonder how to check the network connectivity in Android? There is a new API that you can use but there aren’t many tutorials how to do it. Here is our simple way:

February 12, 2021 · 1 min · gmirchev90

Android Oauth2 token refresh mechanism - OkHttp vs RxJava layering

The RxJava approach I am currently working on an app where the devs before me took this strange decision in regard to the refresh token mechanism - have a single entry point of the app which is called every time whenever you need to have a fresh token. What I mean is this:

February 12, 2021 · 5 min · gmirchev90

Execute an RxJava observable only once in a given time period

Problem Each Android app has an authentication mechanism or at least most of them do. What this auth mechanism does is that it refreshes an access token using a refresh token every N minutes. In our case these N minutes are 7. And now the question is: How do I implement this?

December 17, 2020 · 6 min · gmirchev90