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Icons

Great things are done by a series of small things brought together.

Courtesy of Giphy Images

Icons define’s an apps content in an uniform way. Icons need to be light weight (.webp format) and easy to understand.
If the app icons are flashy or too graphic and not respect to the present UI design trends. Then however good the app is, the user won’t be interested spending time on it.

I have been using these following websites for my daily icon usage when i design or develop any android app.

No matter an icon’s format (.png or .jpeg), you can always compress it by converting it into a WebP Image.

Create WebP Images | Android Studio

To make an icon be compatible to all the devices you are aiming for from the tiniest phone to the largest tab on the market now. You can download an SVG document and add it in the drawable folder of your android app.

Like always my recommendation for a consistent and simple icon is :

Material icons – Material Design

Hint : Can be used for web development too, just click on icon font 🙂 .

Animation

Animation offers a medium of story telling and visual entertainment which can bring pleasure and information to people of all ages everywhere in the world.

One such trend of 2017 is to use animation’s that will keep the user interested in the process of the animation and in the background the required processing takes place asynchronously.

Courtesy of Giphy Images

I usually load the online data from the api to my local database using these animations. This helps my app work in offline mode.

//AsyncTask<Products, Products, Boolean>
class SaveIntoDatabase extends AsyncTask<Products, Void, Void> {

    @Override
    protected Void doInBackground(Products... params) {
        Products products = params[0];

        try {
            if (!mDatabase.CheckIsDataAlreadyInDBorNot(products.getProductID(), products.getProductName(), products.getManufacturerID(), products.getManufacturerName())) {

                mDatabase.addProducts1(products.getProductID(), products.getProductName(), products.getManufacturerID(), products.getManufacturerName());
            }
        } catch (Exception e) {
            Log.d(TAG, e.getMessage());
        }
        return null;
    }
    @Override
    protected void onPreExecute() {
        super.onPreExecute();
    }
}

It can be hard to code animations for a particular widget in the android studio platform for a beginner. As the process is very tedious and the animation is not as flowing as it needs to be.

Most MNCs have multiple teams for an Android app development. The Design team comes up with great design and animations for any widget interaction in the application. BUT when it comes to the developers, they are caught up with lines of code just to make a animation work. This in turn increases the size of the app.

A great work around to make your app stand out and add all the animation that the designer have come up using After Effects or any animation tool is: LOTTIE :).

Lottie is an open-source animation tool by the amazing folks at Airbnb. Its an iOS, Android, and React Native library that renders After Effects animations in real time, allowing apps to use animations as easily as they use static images.

Flexible After Effect Features
Manipulate your animation any way you like
Small file size.

Introducing Lottie

Be part of the community.

LottieFiles – Free high quality Lottie animation files

Hint: Now you can just ask the animation file from the designers and attach the json code to the android app. Thanks to Bodymovin 🙂 .

Best 3rd party Android Libraries.

Android was intended to be very customizable. And we welcome innovations. -Sundar Pichai

You can find all the libraries on Android Arsenal. But like always i will jolt down points of the libraries that change the way your app functions and performs.

Pull to refresh

http://ift.tt/2armzZO
http://ift.tt/2fgOMnP
http://ift.tt/2qmjW5I
http://ift.tt/2qX1tKb

Welcome slider

http://ift.tt/2bWzDL1
http://ift.tt/2aKtIIM
http://ift.tt/2f2Y7Qv
http://ift.tt/2qXlRuI

Navigation menu

UI/UX

Courtesy of Giphy Images

Daily Read’s to be a better developer or designer.

You can’t wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.

Here is a list of my daily inspirations:

Firstly, got to be Medium.
Hewlett-Packard Enterprise (TechBeacon).
Android Blogs.
Airbnb Design.
JustInMind Blogs.
Behnace.
Uplabs.
Dribble.
9-squares.
Motion Corpse.
Animography.
UI Movement.
Design Your Way.

Courtesy of Giphy Images

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Keeping up with the Android . was originally published in Prototyping: From UX to Front End on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Keeping up with the Android .

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