I always thought Adobe After Effects was so cool just for the ability to track moving objects. I never got around to learning After Effects myself, but what I do know is how to deploy a ML model that does the same job…. minus the effects of course. Firebase ML Kit’s Object Detection & Tracking…
Read more
A month past I/O and I’ve only just discovered they’ve expanded the ML Kit yet again with some of the neatest additions yet. The first of which being ML Kit’s Translation and it’s pretty much what it sounds like. You pass in some text and the code translates it. The Kit currently supports 59 languages…
Read more
Google I/O 2019 unveiled a lot about Jetpack, also known as Android X including the new Android X Preferences, SavedState with View Models, and even the new Camera X library. For some of us (including me), this might have been the first time hearing about Jetpack and it’s definitely becoming pretty big, so let’s look…
Read more
So Google I/O 2019 just passed a couple weeks ago and to no surprise, in one of their very many talks, they brought up Kotlin’s new asynchronous feature: Coroutines. Coroutines in a nutshell for those who don’t know: They workaround the use of callbacks by making them into more sequential code through the use of…
Read more
Google I/O this year ended last Thursday and many exciting things were unveiled both for the end user and for the Android Developer. There were a few things for developers to meet that could mean more hours per app, but for the most part, tons of APIs were rolled out that makes development easier for…
Read more
Exactly 21 hours ago from when I’m writing this sentence, I got a comment on my Essential Libraries February 2019 post telling me one of my entries was outdated for a 2019 list. If he said it was Butterknife, sure I’d probably agree (I admit that was an ass-pull). To my surprise however, he was…
Read more
If you have any basic knowledge of RxJava, you’d know that an Observable is a stream ready to emit data when a Subscriber subscribes to it. A Subject is well, both an Observable and a Subscriber. It can subscribe to one or more observables, and can re-emit that data and possibly new data as well…
Read more
If there’s one thing that had a drastic change in the way I develop apps, it’s learning about Android architecture. Sure, I learned a few libraries in my journey, RxJava, Firebase, Retrofit, and they all helped, but nothing completely changed the way I write code than, well, changing the fundamentals of how you write. Changing…
Read more
Android Q Beta 2 is out now for us to test with, see what new developments they’ve made to the ecosystem and how it affects our apps. Images are now available for us to run our emulators with, as for physical devices, it is already compatible with all the Pixel devices. Android Q introduces support…
Read more
So this one’s going to be a bit different, and a little more serious. Over the past few months, my blogs have been all over the place. Eric Decanini as a blog started out by explaining each Firebase tool and service and put it in a way that would be easy to understand for even…
Read more
It’s been almost a year since the release of Firebase ML Kit and the team brought some neat changes to the package: 4 new AI models to do with Natural Language and Preparation for Production. Of course, as one who advocates the ease of use of AI so endearingly as long as it doesn’t destroy…
Read more
For the caveman who have yet to know what an index is, a database index is a value stored that maps items in the database to their locations. In other words, this lets queries happen faster as without an index, a query would have to crawl through items in the database one by one and…
Read more
We’ve all seen it at least once before: that little extra layer of security when we create an account on Gmail, Netflix, and possibly on every login into our online bank accounts. A verification code is sent to our device which we have to enter to get past that glorious second layer. If you want…
Read more
It’s probably common knowledge right now that doing a standard email-password authentication in Firebase is piss easy. The same can’t be said about using it’s various providers, Facebook, Twitter, Google, Play Games, Github, etc. and that’s because each one requires its own unique set up which isn’t always so straightforward. Today, I’m going to focus…
Read more
Firebase provides us 3 plans for their pricing: the free Spark plan which gives generous allocations to most of their products for many hobbyists and indie developers; the fixed Flame plan which costs $25/month to give a project bigger allocations to Firebase product usage; and the wild Blaze plan whose cost scales with your usage of it.…
Read more
There comes a time in every Android Developer’s blog where they have to talk about LIBRARIES. Not just any libraries, but the libraries that you’ll see as an essential on pretty much every job you’ll be applying for. Even if this ain’t the case, it’s undeniably that these are the libraries that will help you out…
Read more
