Today I would like to take a short break from writing about coding and talk a bit about some tools I have come across to ease the life of android developers and designers. I would be more then happy if you guys could give some more tips and tricks and add to this list of tools.
Faster Emulater
When I first started developing on android the most frustrating factor was the poor performance of the emulator. If you are not capable to debug and develop on the real device you are in for some frustrating moments. Just read my blog post on the topic if you want to hear my rant. Anyway +Zachary Dreeman suggested to try out Genymotion. I did and I must say the performance boost is magnificent. Genymotion provides a Android test system on a virtual box image with some additional tools for simulating battery status, GPS, etc ... After installing the tooling itself you need to download the images and can then start them. After the vm starts up, which takes a minute or two, it is quick and responsive. Currently there are only downloadable images up to Android 4.2.2. But considering the much better performance compared to the stock emulator it is well worth the effort and since it is open source it should only be a matter of time until somebody provides more images.
Layout Grid
Android provides some nice debugging options to help you in designing your UI. One of them is the ability to show all layout boundaries. To enable this setting first turn on the developer options on your device by pressing several times on the build number in the About phone section in the settings. This will make the developer options appear in the settings and there you can check the "Show layout bounds" section.
The problem is once you see the layout boundaries it tends to be tedious to fix layout issues by changing dimension, recompiling and deploying to update the app. Wouldn't it be nice to have a grid of a predetermined size in order to have some clue on the dimensions of things. Well I stumbled across GridWichterle in a G+ post.
It is a simple app which allows you to overlay a grid over your app to show how your elements align. The distance of a grid element can be configured in dp and the color of the grid can be changed. The app seems simple but I found it of great help to have this grid to see how elements align and to have a measurement of how big elements have to be.
Summary
Now I'm waiting for your list of tools which ease development and design. I will try to give a follow up post with a compiled list of all the cool tools you add to this list. I'm eager to hear from you...
Yours truely
Stefan Langer
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