A year ago I shared some graphic assets to help developers and designers create applications that are consistent with other map-based Android UIs. At that time, Google Maps Android API v2 didn’t exist and developers had to use the Google Maps External Library which was - I won’t mince words - so poorly implemented you had to create everything on your own (markers, info windows, etc.)… The release of Google Maps Android API v2 has been a huge step forward regarding map rendering capabilities on Android. The new framework has suffered and still suffers from sometimes unpleasant drawbacks1. From ..read more

In the past 6 months, my Android development environment has changed quite a lot. If you follow me on Google+ and/or Twitter, you may have noticed these changes reading some of my latest tips. I love talking about UI and performance but I also seriously consider tools are crucial entities in the process of developing nice and polished Android apps. In this post, I share about my experience and the tools I use everyday when coding: A blazingly fast virtual device: Genymotion A powerful IDE: Android Studio An evolved build system: Gradle Developing awesome apps requires energy, passion and com ..read more

Back in November 2012, I wrote a blog post entitled “ActionBar on the Move”. This article was mainly dealing with a technique to nicely and uniquely animate your ActionBar. Although I mentioned some of the effect’s possible applications, I never had time to effectively add an ActionBar animation to one of my own apps nor saw an application on the Play Store taking advantage of it. While being at Google I/O last week, I finally found an application using the ActionBar animation technique. Let’s be honest, it literally blew my mind the first time I saw it. I felt in love with the nice, subtle an ..read more

In October 2012, I released a library called Polaris. At that time, the library received quite a lot of success because it was really filling the mammoth blanks of the Google Maps external library (aka Google Maps Android API v1): effortless map annotation, gesture support, map callout support, built-in “user tracking” mode, etc. If you have never heard of Polaris feel free to checkout one of the links below: Polaris GitHub page “Meet Polaris, a Map Library for Android” blog post “Polaris, simple mapping library for Android” slides (Un)fortunately - the addition/removal of the ‘un’ obviously ..read more

Some of you may have noticed the maintenance page this weekend and the new face of this website. I’ve recently spent some time lately working on a complete redesign of my cyrilmottier.com domain. Here is a brief explanation of the motivations behind this redesign and a list of the main changes. 3 or 4 months ago I received an email from my host telling me they were dropping support of my old version of PHP (5.2). The version of Wordpress used for my android.cyrilmottier.com blog was so old it wasn’t supporting the PHP 5.4 and can’t even upgrade itself to a PHP 5.4 compliant version… Not being ..read more