Creating Realistic Sky Gradients That Change With the Sun When you look at a great live wallpaper, what makes it feel alive isn’t just animation — it’s the sky. A static blue-to-orange gradient at the top of your screen feels dead after five minutes. But a sky that actually shifts through dawn blues, golden hours, […]
The Networking Problem in KMP Projects Before Kotlin Multiplatform, Android had Retrofit and OkHttp while iOS had URLSession or Alamofire — two completely separate networking stacks, two sets of models to keep in sync, and twice the bugs to chase. KMP solves this at the shared-module level, and Ktor Client is the library built specifically
The Core Problem KMP Has to Solve Kotlin Multiplatform lets you share business logic across Android, iOS, desktop, and web — but each platform still has its own APIs. Android has Log, iOS has NSLog, Android has SharedPreferences, iOS has NSUserDefaults. KMP’s answer to this is a two-keyword mechanism: expect and actual. It’s the single
Why Property Delegates Often Go Unnoticed Most Kotlin developers know lazy — it’s everywhere. You see it in Android ViewModels, dependency injection setups, and library code. But the standard library ships two more property delegates that are surprisingly powerful and almost never discussed: Delegates.observable and Delegates.vetoable. If you’ve been wiring up manual setters or using
Making Your Wallpaper Respond to Real-World Weather A beautiful sky gradient is a good start, but what makes Seasons Live Wallpaper feel special is that it reacts to the actual weather outside your window. Rain particles drift down when it’s raining. Snow accumulates during winter storms. Fog creeps in on humid mornings. Lightning flashes light
Rubber Duck Debugging with AI: The Modern Approach “Rubber duck debugging” is an old technique: you explain your bug to an inanimate object (a rubber duck), and in the process of explaining, you discover the problem yourself. Today’s AI assistants make this technique more powerful. Instead of talking to a duck, you can ask an
The Part of Android Development “Nobody Enjoys” :P Writing tests and debugging are the two parts of Android development where most developers lose the most time. Tests feel like writing code twice, and debugging often means staring at a stack trace while trying to hold an entire call graph in your head. Claude Code doesn’t
Writing a Play Store listing that converts is harder than it looks. The character limits are tight, keywords matter, and you have about three seconds to grab attention. Here’s how I use Claude to make it easier — including the exact prompts I use for Seasons Live Wallpaper. Keyword Research Prompt “I have an Android
One of the most satisfying things to code is a particle system. Snowflakes, falling leaves, fireflies — simple physics, beautiful results. Here’s how Seasons Live Wallpaper handles its snow, and how you can build something similar. The Particle Data Class data class Snowflake( var x: Float, var y: Float, val radius: Float, // visual size
Android Studio and productivity One interesting feature that Android Studio and IntelliJ IDEA have is the Productivity Guide panel. It helps you see how much of the productivity tools that are available and you are using. You can see here a quick screenshot with the one I have, on one of the computers I am
I’ve stumbled across a lot of logs noise in Android Studio throughout the time and it can be a pain when you need to debug a crash or just read some important logs of your app when your device/emulator prints lots of logs. Those logs are helpful for some cases but might not be for
In this tutorial I will create a simple Sectioned RecyclerView that will show 2 sections and a few items in each section and how to move an item from one section to another. Note: For RecyclerView I used AndroidX imports and not android.support.v7.widget.RecyclerView Setup We need to import the recycler view from AndroidX. The build.gradle
Recently, I had to add a perfect squared CardView and I wanted to achieve this without hardcoding its width and height. I happily discovered the power of ConstraintLayout. And so this is how I managed to create a perfect square which should work on every dimension. Heres some sample code that I used to create
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
