Android Notification White Square Icon

We have all seen the white square at the top type of a notification in the notification bar.

Android Studio Live Templates

I was really wondering how I can remove repetitive tasks from Android Studio by assigning shortcuts or tags and I found that IntelliJ has Live Templates which I bet that little programmers use. So as an example I wanted when I type the word “tag” within a class the following to be autocompleted:

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Android adb server version (32) doesn’t match this client (Genymotion)

Probably you have seen this type of error when using Genymotion as the Android emulator on which you test your device. This is how the error looks like:

adb server version (32) doesn’t match this client (35); killing…
error: could not install *smartsocket* listener: Address already in use
ADB server didn’t ACK
* failed to start daemon *

There is one simple thing that worked for me. I opened the Settings menu of Genymotion, then ADB tab and selected: Use custom android SDK tools and I set the path to the tools. By default Genymotion uses its built-in tools. After that killing all working emulators and starting them again makes everything work.

Hope I have helped!

Card.io issue not supporting Samsung S5 and other devices

card.io 5.4.2

Card.io is a card recognition SDK used by PayPal which allows you to easily scan your own credit/debit cards and get information about them in the code.

Problem

Using card.io from the source and not from Maven requires you to have the latest Android NDK with which the project will be built. But compiling it with the latest NDK introduces a bug which prevents the library from supporting several phones like Samsung S5, Honor 7 and others.

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Gaps between layout components in Android

There is a very simple solution in Android if you want to have space between components. You can always set margins but you can also use the Space class. You can use it like this:

<Space
  android:layout_width="1dp"
  android:layout_height="30dp"/>

Exporting Card.IO as a fragment

You probably know the famous card detection library called card.io. It is developed by PayPal and used worldwide. There is a lot of OpenCV usage behind it, but I will leave this for another article.

The problem

The problem is that the library can only be used as a separate module. You can call the card.io Activity and it will return you the results from the detection. But what if you want to embed the detection view inside your app? Well, sadly, there is no fragment for that. But the library is open-source so you can change everything to fit your needs. So let’s start then!

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Spinner in Toolbar – How to change the selected item text color?

That bastard drove me nuts today. I do not understand why is it so hard to fix. I want the text to be white. After 2 hours of reading useless posts, I found a solution working for me.

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Implementing Face Detection in Android

Recently, I got a task to implement face detection for a camera preview we have within our mobile app. So if the app detects a face, a button should be displayed, otherwise – the button should remain hidden. There are several ways to implement face detection in Android

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Android Flux Architecture Example

I found Flux architecture for several months and I have written a couple apps with React & Flux and as an Android programmer also I think that it has to have an implementation.

So I decided to do it. You can check it HERE. I really believe that Flux for Android will be a “groundbreaker” (may be not my try but the whole concept :)).

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Sample architecture to handle notifications in Android

The use case

I am working in a company here in Bulgaria where we are building a huge android app with over 250 screens. It was time to integrate Firebase push notifications in it. Here were the requirements for them:

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