Wait for it…a deep dive in Espresso's idling resources

Update: A new (better) version of this post is available on the Jimdo Dev Blog.

Recently I invested a decent amount of time in making our functional tests less clunky, especially when there are async computations involved. We started using Espresso a few days after it was released and never looked back. In this blog post I’d like to focus on how you can tell Espresso to wait for an async computation to finish before performing any actions on a View, and a few gotchas I learned.

WebView Explorations

In the last few weeks I’ve been playing around with WebViews a lot and found out a few interesting differences (not necesserely documented) between the legacy implementation up to Jelly Bean and the brand new Chromium-based one in KitKat. If you don’t know what I’m talking about - after all, the API has mostly remained untouched apart some nice additions, more about this in a bit - a couple of useful links by the Google folks are this and this.

Dealing with the unforeseen

It’s quite common to invite users to rate an app on Google Play at some point, on one hand it’s good to know that your users are happy and on the other it’s a good way to attract new users. It’s definitely not the only variable in the equation, but I can definitely say that user satisfaction is inversely proportional to the amount of crashes. But bugs are unfortunately something we have to expect as developers, even after testing our apps thoroughly. One thing we probably don’t want to do, is to ask a user to rate our app just after a crash since we can be reasonably sure that he’s not going to be too happy about it. How can we make sure that this doesn’t happen?

Location on Android...the Qype way

Some months ago we released the first stable version of ignition. In this post I explaned how the ignition-location library works and how it’s possible to include it in an already existing application. This time I’ll explain how we integrated it in the Qype Android application.

ignition v0.1 - the ignited way of doing location

Today as part of our Fun Friday we released version 0.1 of ignition, an Android library that should make your life as an Android developer much less painful. What I’d like to write about here is the module I focused on, that is the ignition-location module. Personally I started working with Android almost 3 years ago, in Android terms that means Android v1.5 - Cupcake - API level 3. It wasn’t easy to understand the framework back then, lots of documentation was missing and I spent hours digging in the source code to understand of things were supposed to work. A lot has changed since 1.5, and developing Android applications has become way easier with better documented APIs and better tools.