Author name: Catalin Prata

Born in Alba Iulia, a beautiful city from Romania. I like hiking and everything related with electronics and IT . Eager to learn and enhance my knowledge in programming languages. My main specialization is on Mobile Applications development (Android and iOS).

Articles, IoT

Smart home (IoT) – the beginnings

Intro Since I am a fan of DYI and love gadgets(and IoT), I started to play with a Raspberry Pi and ESP8266 for a while. I had some failing ideas like automating my curtains, after long plans and setup, I abandoned the idea because I couldn’t see a way to make it look nice with […]

, , , , ,
Snippets, Solutions

How to get current flavor from gradle

 Figuring out how to pull the current flavor from gradle While working on an update for one of our games, I needed to figure out how to get the current flavor and use it in code. Since there are a lot of ways to do this, I chose to create a custom build config parameter and

, , ,
Did You Know?, Solutions

Signing key SHA1 fingerprints within AndroidStudio

Did you know you can get the signing SHA1 and MD5 fingerprints within AndroidStudio? Ever needed the SHA1, SHA-256 or MD5 fingerprints of your Android debug/release key/certificate? Maybe for a new API or framework that you want to integrate in your project like Firebase, Facebook or Maps? See that you can also get it from AndroidStudio, pretty

, , , , , , ,
Snippets

Generate random number between 2 numbers

The following snippet will help you generate a random number in Java that is between 2 numbers (min and max). static Random random = new Random(); /** * Min is inclusive and max is exclusive in this case **/ public static int randomBetween(int min, int max) { return random.nextInt(max – min) + min; } Please

, ,
Snippets

Get screen size programatically in Android (Compose / Kotlin, Java)

So if you ever need to get the screen size(width and height) programatically on Android, note that there are a few options out there. Please see below some of them. Get Android screen size from DisplayMetrics The following snippet helps you load the screen size in Android using the Display class. This is quite old,

, , , , , ,
Tools

IntelliJ IDEA / Android Studio key shortcuts

Here is a newer post about Android Studio productivity guide in case you are looking for that. This is just a small productivity A4 poster with MacOS IntelliJ IDEA and Android Studio key mapping that can be placed on your wall :).

, , , , ,
Solutions

GSON & Realm String array

You might know about Realm, a fancy and practical storage option that one can use on Android. Realm is quite fast and it is really easy to work with but recently I had to parse some data from the webservice and I wanted to use GSON, the Android Json parser library. All works well if

, , ,
Solutions, Tutorials

Google Play Games API + Playground

The Problem… So I wanted to reset my score on one of my google play games here(QuickAZ) and for that I could use Google Play Games API if the user was registered as a tester in the play console. In order to easily authenticate to the service and test the API I used Google’s Playground. The only

, , ,
Solutions, Tutorials

Load localized strings at runtime

Here is a possible solution if you want to load localized text resources on a TextView in Android. Problem: You may need to extend your app flexibility to be able to load localized texts at runtime from a web server for example. That would be to be able to add new localizations (for new countries)

, , , , , , , ,
Snippets, Solutions

How to unzip Gzipped InputStream

If you are working with HttpURLConnection on Android then you might encounter strange InputStream outputs like when you have a strange character encoding even though on the server side everything seems ok. A problem I was encountered lately was when I needed to parse a RSS/Atom feed on Android. I was getting the following error:

, , , ,
Snippets, Solutions

Print Android signing key SHA in code

If you ever want to get the Android SHA (1/256), MD5 or the signing key used to sign your app for example you can use the following snippet. Important! Be aware that you should not print that in a production environment as it might leak sensitive data API 28> (Kotlin) Deprecated (Java) And the converter

, , , , , , , ,
Solutions, Tutorials

Make Genymotion point to localhost

I had a lot of fights with this and I think it’s better to write down the solution so I won’t waste my time looking again on google/stackoverflow for it. Maybe this will help you too! Problem You might have a local webservice or something on your machine that needs to be accessed from a

, , , , ,
Snippets, Solutions, Tutorials

Add links to a TextView in Android

Maybe you need to add links to a TextView on Android but you don’t want to use Linkify for some reasons and you also want that link to be opened when the user taps it. Here is a simple solution: yourTextView.setText(Html.fromHtml( “Text with a ” + “<a href=\”http://www.myandroidsolutions.com/\”>link to My Android Solutions</a> “)); // this is

, , , ,
Scroll to Top