Nowadays, everyone seems to do stuff with OpenAI’s GPT-3/ChatGPT. But how much more useful would it be, if OpenAI’s text completion APIs would return structured data, like JSON, instead of plain text? Consider the following use case: you want to create a little app that uses the OpenAI GPT-3 API…

I’ve been working remotely for 6 years straight now. And no matter what my co-founder thinks, I could surely never (?*) go back to regular office life. Now, I’m sure you’re thinking: not another treaty on the benefits of working remotely from a privileged knowledge worker. Well, in part you…

It’s that time of the year where many of us revise their workflows and try to optimise. And boy, there is always quite a lot to improve! This time my GitHub workflow was ripe for a productivity check. Something, that I always found cumbersome since the inception of the amazing…

Consider this: You need a button to change its elevation depending on the scroll state of a RecyclerView (in fact any ScrollingView): the button (which for various reasons I decided to implement as an ImageView should have zero elevation when the RecyclerView is at scroll position 0 and 6 dp…

Something I’ve only discovered after 10 years of Android development: Setting zero elevation on clickable elements causes them to not being clickable anymore! I haven’t yet investigated whether this is a bug or a feature, but here is a simple workaround (by means of BindingAdapters, but of course you can…

Sifting through the web I stumbled upon a little API called zen which is provided by the guys over at GitHub. The API returns a random (mostly developer focused) piece of wisdom and is accessible via https://api.github.com/zen I thought it might be nice to have such a thing every time…

Oftentimes, when locally building release builds, e.g. to debug issues, you don’t have access to the signing config as you maybe just have it available on your CI — after all you should really try to avoid storing your release keystores on your local development machine. However, Android Studio will…

Today I stumbled about one of these tiny things which — once you uncover them — immensely ease your life. Consider a String with placeholders stored in your strings.xml: Now let's say we want to use that String directly in data binding. Before figuring out the following trick I would fetch the data from the attached ViewModel which would use String.format() to replace the placeholder with e.g. the user name.

Let’s imagine you need to provide a gradient background consisting of arbitrarily many colors to a View. This can’t be done via regular drawable XML as a gradient within a shape can only define three colors: startColor, centerColor, endColor. To reach our goal we will be using data binding. We define an integer array in e.g. arrays.xml and fill it with the desired color resources: Then we define a binding adapter to apply the colors in a gradient to the background of the View: