This last Christmas, when I visited my grandfather, I saw this game I had gifted him a few years ago. I asked him if he had solved it, and to my surprise, he hadn’t found a solution yet. I remember seeing his notes, the strategies he came up with (back-tracking, segmenting the regions), a gentle reminder of how interesting the game is. I personally had also only solved it once, and since I enjoy solving problems with programming, why not coding a solution for it?

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This post celebrates the stable release of Carioca, a suite of testing libraries for Android that I’ve been working on since the last year.

This project is available here: https://github.com/rubensousa/Carioca

It contains 3 main component libraries:

1. Instrumented test reports
2. Hilt helper components
3. Useful JUnit4 rules

In this post, I will briefly mention the set of libraries available. For more information about them, please check the website

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When I first started working in Android TV in a project back in 2018, androidx was still a new thing and Leanback was the standard guide for building Android TV applications.

In fact, Leanback still is the recommended way by Google to build TV apps and the androidx libraries contain some helpers for TV UIs: https://developer.android.com/training/tv/start/start#tv-libraries

However, these libraries are too opinionated and not really flexible enough.

In this post I will go over the motivation for a new component for Android TV.

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GitHub has released GitHub Packages last year. You can now easily host your private libraries without subscribing to another service.

In this post, we’re going to setup GitHub Packages to publish an example Android library.

We’ll be following these steps:

1. Creating credentials for accessing GitHub’s maven repository
2. Publishing an Android library to GitHub’s maven repository using a Gradle plugin
3. Installing an Android library in another project

The sample project is available on GitHub here: https://github.com/rubensousa/AndroidGithubPackage

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In this post I’m going to address scroll state saving of nested RecyclerViews.

By default, if you scroll the parent RecyclerView, the nested RecyclerViews don’t save and restore state automatically.

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A while ago, I released the 2.0 version of GravitySnapHelper with an extra goodie class called OrientationAwareRecyclerView.

I didn’t have the chance to properly explain the reason for that class, so I figured I would write some blog posts with some tips for nested RecyclerViews.

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Since Material Design was introduced, Android has 3 main types of buttons:

• Floating action buttons
• Raised buttons
• Flat buttons

According to the spec, the raised button definition is:

A typically rectangular material button that lifts and displays ink reactions on press.

But why should it lift? Does your finger work like a magnet? When you press any real button, the force you apply makes the button go down.

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The 24.2.0 version of the support library introduced two new classes (SnapHelper and LinearSnapHelper) that should be used to handle snapping in a RecyclerView.

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The support library 23.2.0 introduced a couple of classes to create BottomSheets, so I figured out we should have an easy way to setup a simple BottomSheet with some options.

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