One of the best ways to display huge lists in Android is through RecyclerView. As developers, you all might have used it. We have many advanced features like view holder patterns, rich animation, Diff-Utils callback to improve performance, etc. Apps like WhatsApp and Gmail use RecyclerView to show endless conversations.

One of the significant RecyclerView features that I use is view types. We can display multiple view types in the same RecyclerView. …

In the early stages of my career, I thought completing a task as quickly as possible was what made you a productive developer. I’m sure many of you thought the same, but you know what they say:

“ Good judgment comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgment.”

Fast-forward to today, and I’m an Android developer with five years of experience. The most vital lesson I’ve learned from my experience is that having the proper architecture is just as important as finishing the job on time.

A day or a year from now, you’ll probably end up in a…

This is the second part of a series in which you’ll learn about data binding basics and how to use data binding with architecture components like LiveData and ViewModel. In today’s article, you’ll learn how to use LiveData to update the UI via data binding, keeping ViewModel as the data source.

Introduction

Data binding

Data binding is the framework that acts as a bridge between layouts and data sources by reducing the boilerplate code that developers need to write. This will increase the productivity of developers by providing them with the time to concentrate on what matters.

If you’re new to data binding…

You might have already gone through a bunch of articles related to Kotlin extensions, but this article is not all about extensions. It’s about making your code expressive, so I’ve compiled a list of my top extensions that keep code as natural as possible.

This is the second part of this series. If you’re new to Kotlin or the concept of extensions, I would highly recommend reading the first part to learn the basics.

1. isOnline

A network request is an inevitable task to perform in most mobile applications. Checking whether the user is connected to the internet or not is crucial…

In this article, you’ll learn how to implement RecyclerView, which offers you the ability to swipe items. We’re going to do this without using any third-party libraries. We’ll use RecyclerView default decorators and a couple of interfaces to achieve this.

If you’re interested, a GitHub repo link with the implementation is embedded at the end of the article.

Let’s get started!

Introduction

If you’ve been an Android developer for a while, you know that RecyclerView is the optimized solution to display huge datasets with effective memory management.

Unlike its predecessor (listview), RecyclerView comes with huge support like ItemTouchHelper, simple animations, and…

This is the beginning of a series in which you’ll learn about data binding basics and how to use data binding with architecture components like LiveData and ViewModel.

In this part, we’ll cover the basics, two-way binding, and code optimization.

Introduction

Data binding is a framework that acts as a bridge between layouts and data sources by reducing the boilerplate code that developers need to write. This will increase their productivity by providing them with the time to concentrate on what matters.

I assume you’re familiar with the basics of data binding. …

You might have already gone through a bunch of articles on Kotlin extensions, but this article is not all about extensions. It’s about making your code expressive, so I’ve concentrated on explaining and including my top extensions that keep code as natural as possible.

The main goal is to learn how to make your code expressive in your own way by using the concept of extensions rather than copy-pasting the code snippets.

Introduction

Kotlin is a modern and expressive language built with developers in mind. …

Until now, we’ve only seen Jetpack Compose in Android development. Today, we’re entering a new phase, as JetBrains announced an early-access version of IntelliJ that allows you to use Jetpack Compose to build Windows applications.

This is the first of many articles I will write in the coming days explaining how to use Jetpack Compose for desktop. Last month, JetBrains released Compose for desktop Milestone 2, which brings a better development experience and interoperability.

As always, JetBrains is trying to ease developers’ lives by providing exclusive project wizards. …