To the Management: I am leaving this unsolicited review which, even though management did not ask for it, I hope will be helpful to both your staff and leadership team. My recent stay at your establishment was initially marred by several events and miscommunications, but in the end I have…

Creating and animating rounded shapes with AndroidX, Part II —

Creating and animating rounded shapes with AndroidX, Part I —

2022: The year Santa’s gift delivery process changed — Santa has always been a Do It Yourself-er. From the earliest days, he believed in doing everything on his own: making the gifts, building his sleigh, feeding the reindeer — even stuffing the bag to the brim was something he insisted on overseeing personally. But as the years became decades…

Androids: The Missing Pieces, Part IV — Like the previous articles in this series (I, II, and III), the following article is based on information from Androids: The Team That Built the Android Operating System. Sometimes, 412 pages just isn’t long enough, so here are a few more words on the subject. One of the things that…

RenderEffects #3: Using RenderNode for faster, better blurring — The previous two articles covered (in more detail, and in many more words), content that I talked very quickly about in the video Android Graphics that I made with Sumir Kataria for the recent Android Developer Summit event. This article goes beyond that content, though I did touch on it…

Recording an audio book was… a lot more work than I thought it would be — When I finally published Androids: The Team That Built the Android Operating System after 4 years of interviewing, researching, writing, rewriting, and editing, I was able to relax and stop thinking about the book. For about two weeks. Then I thought, “I wonder if people would like an audiobook version…

RenderEffects #2: Pixel shaders in Android 13 — In the previous article, I showed how to create a blur RenderEffect to easily blur everything in a View. This effect, while fun, is… not terribly useful on its own. We tend to want things to see things more clearly, not more blurry. It’s why we wear glasses. …

Android RenderEffects #1: the blur effect — This article (and the next one) is essentially a written version of my part of a video that Sumir Kataria and I recorded for this year’s Android Developer Summit: When I set about learning how to use the Blur effect, it…