Category: android development

AntennaPod 2.7.1 – released

November 15th, 2022

What’s new

∙ View “New Episodes” list now in a dedicated screen called Inbox, with swipe actions (@ByteHamster)
∙ Use swipe actions and quickly toggle Favourites on the Episodes screen (@ByteHamster)
∙ View a list of (unplayed) episodes in Android Auto (@tonytamsf)
∙ Scroll to the top of lists by long-pressing the toolbar (@ByteHamster)
∙ Bug fixes around authentication for podcasts & Nextcloud sync (@ByteHamster)
∙ Directly open localised documentation if available (for now: da, fr, it, nl) (@ByteHamster)
Search the Android Source code

December 23rd, 2021

This page helps Android developers find the sources they’re looking for – androidsrc.dev
AntennaPod 27th Pull Request: more global and more inclusive

October 11th, 2020
I love contributing to products that I use daily. One of those is the open source Android podcast player AntennaPod.

For my 27th pull request: Discovery filter by country & hide discovery on first subscribe screen to the source code project I wanted to accomplish the following.
- Give people who are offended by certain top podcasts that always appear in the ‘Discover’ screen and they have a way to remove these podcasts. Request #4509
- “alt right” content could be hidden for those who don’t want to see them, but not having the developer having to make editorial choices. Request #4355
- Enable a worldwide perspective of ‘Discover’, allow users to truly discover and see the wide array of content available, in all languages and from see what 250 countries worldwide are listening to. Request #3982
I have always learned a lot while doing Android Java coding.
- Locale.getISOCountries()
  - You can get the entire 250 countries country codes and country names translated to the local language of your Android device using locale.getDisplayCountry();
- A very useful library for Android to send and receive events so different Fragments can communicate. The EventBus library allow for a event bug and subscriber model. You can search for the code in my pull request.
  - EventBus.getDefault().register(this);
  - EventBus.getDefault().unregister(this);
  - onDiscoveryDefaultupdateEvent()

Android Dev: Linting

April 4th, 2020

In order to suppress linting warnings that do not make sense, one can use the @SuppressLint decorator. In order to know which warning string to use, here is a quick time. Thank you StackOverflow

Tonys-MacBook-Air:tools tonytam$ pwd
/Users/tonytam/Library/Android/sdk/tools

Tonys-MacBook-Air:tools tonytam$ !.
./bin/lint --list | grep -i used

"UnusedAttribute": Attribute unused on older versions
"UnsafeDynamicallyLoadedCode": load used to dynamically load code
"UnusedNamespace": Unused namespace
"UnusedQuantity": Unused quantity translations
"SetWorldReadable": File.setReadable() used to make file world-readable
"SetWorldWritable": File.setWritable() used to make file world-writable
"UnusedResources": Unused resources
"UnusedIds": Unused id
"EnforceUTF8": Encoding used in resource files is not UTF-8

Android Dev: EventBus : Publisher + Subscriber

April 4th, 2020

While trying to implement a feature for AntennaPod to allow users to auto skip intros and endings in this pull request #3975, I need to be able publish the event when a preference has changed and for a previous object with state that has already read the value of the preference to refresh it’s content.

I’m starting to learn on org.greenrobot.evenbus, and came across this funny term POJO
Debugging Android Auto As A Developer

February 17th, 2020
In order to debug Android Auto
```
cd ~/Library/Android/sdk
./platform-tools/adb forward tcp:5277 tcp:5277
```
```
./extras/google/auto/desktop-head-unit
```
On your phone/emulator, turn on debugging then in Android Auto

Settings -> Start head unit server

Reference:
- Setup for Android Autos – https://developer.android.com/training/cars/media
- Setup your testing environment – https://developer.android.com/training/cars/testing
- See Tony’s PR contribution to AntennaPod
link: Android Studio plugins

February 16th, 2020

Let the machine help you build/make Android apps. Start with some of these plugins.

https://blog.codota.com/top-17-plugins-for-android-studio/
Android SDK Documentation Offline Viewing

January 26th, 2020

Having documentation right at your finger tips for Android SDK.

Open it in your browser at file:///Users/tonytam/Library/Android/sdk/docs/index.html
Podcast Ecosystem : Fun Facts

January 25th, 2020
When I started working on a hackathon project to publish the Splunk .conf videos from our conf.splunk.com site into a podcast form, I learned a lot that I didn’t know. This learning through hands on work has led me to contributing software code to an open source project call AntennaPod. I will write more later about what I learned about contributing code to open sourced software, bug me if you are interested.

Interesting Facts About The Podcast Ecosystem
1. The entire ecosystem revolves around the iTunes store for Podcasts.
  1. Most podcasts apps (both iOS and Android) uses the iTunes top podcast directory and iTunes search API interface to discover and find podcasts. If your podcast is not listed on iTunes, you will not get found. So most podcast publishers will always list their podcast on iTunes first.
    
    iTunes has a podcastsconnect.apple.com for publishers to register their podcasts. Here is where Apple mandates the publisher to add in <itunes:explicit> <itunes:summary> and <itunes:category> tags. Which helps them with the next step in building a nicely categorized genre direcetory
    
    Apple has built a very useful directory of podcasts by country using 112 categories. {US, China, Germany .. etc}
    
    Apple provides a toppodcast API for mobile apps to build a browser interface for users to discover podcast by genre. Want to see the top travel podcasts? https://itunes.apple.com/us/rss/toppodcasts/limit=100/explicit=true/genre=1320/xml
    
    genre=1320 the Places and Travel category in all countries (China Places & Travel as an example by changing the url to ‘/cn/’)
2. I worked at Yahoo News for 16 years as well as My Yahoo. Back in the 1999-2005 times, most news agencies published their full story or new snippets in the RSS format in order to be aggregated by Yahoo sites. RSS is simple and ubiquitous. Still used for syndicating all blog articles and all podcasts around the world. Learn more here on wikipedia.
3. There are 892,254 podcasts around the world. 59,198,524 episodes. [ref listennotes.com]
4. There are other companies out there trying to get into the market. Google gave up on podcasts but had since launched a default podcast player and a podcast store. Spodify is also recognizing this is a nascent ecosystem and has built in podcast into their app and has bought two podcast publishing brands to create premium podcasts.
5. There is a podcast about the podcast ecosystem, podnews.net. Roughly 3 minute per episode and a very good website if you wanted to get into the learning more about the industry.
6. The largest mobile app out there? The jury is still out , checkout this 2020 article comparing the market share as reported by Chartable, Lybsyn and MiDia [ref].
7. RSS is one of the great equalizers. It’s simple enough for a one man shop [ref] [ref] to build a search engine. It doesn’t not need another aggregator, even though iTunes currently plays that role. It’s extensible enough to support future needs such as better categorization, metadata, monetization, automated ads, subscription, protected feeds.
8. Why do podcast hosts always say “Please rate us on iTunes, it will help us get discover.”? It’s because there is no other central store for ratings and most importantly, it leads to discovery. Even though Android is 70% of the world of mobile phones. Google has given up on this growing marketplace and now it’s trying to come back into it.
9. I very optimistic about the future of podcasting and the creators. I subscribe to 150+ podcasts and I love learning from very different perspectives from the hosts and most importantly the guests. I’ve started to contribute software code in order to continue to learn about the podcast ecosystem from the perspective of a Android mobile app.
10. What I learn while contributing code [pull requests | issues]
  1. Chapter markers in the MP4 streams. Are a thing in Germany but because most podcast clients don’t show and honor it, most US podcasters (90%) don’t add chapter markers. See my pull request here.
  2. Thinking truly globally and thinking about accessibility looking at geo-location and language is important for non-US growth. Look at this bug I’m fixing in AntennaPod.
  3. Even though of iTunes has a global directory, for every language and country many apps don’t provide a seamless experience for non-US. This is an opportunity to create better user experience across the world. See my fix to add browsing by country and genre here to AntennaPod
As Mary Meeker writes in her 2019 State of the Internet report, page 50, Podcast Listeners will grow 2x in four years from the base of 70MM.
Design and building Android wear app with my daughter

September 12th, 2017

On Oct 5th, my co-worker Ollie R. and I were chatting during breakfast and he was showing me his Android Wear watch. When he told me that developing for wearable devices is pretty new and something worth getting into, I went to Amazon the next day and bought a refurbished 2014 Moto 360 for $112

I asked my 14 year old daughter @cate_no_kate to do the box opening, sync the watch to my Android Note 4 to give her a simple box opening joy as well to see how easy it would be setup. After about 30 minutes the Moto 360 was on and connected.

The next few days, I played with the watch. It was nice, but I was itching do some development on it and launch an app on the Google Play store. I am a GTD nut. I use Trello, Google Keep, Evernote but I often overbook my TODO lists so I decided to build an app called ‘Just 3’ which just let’s you deal with 3 tasks a day.

After tinkering with Android Studio, I had a hello world app on Day 1.

To add todo items, I had to add them as string resources in Android Studio, build and deploy it to the phone. I had to do this everyday until I figure out how I wanted to add items on the watch. This kept me developing the app every day.
Small reasons why I enjoy developing for Android over iOS

October 28th, 2015

I have developed a set of small apps that I have published to the Apple Store and Google Playstore. Recently I have been playing around with Android Wear and a refurbished 2014 Moto 360 watch and wrote a simple app on the watch to only focus on 3 todo’s a day, call ‘tri wear‘. The design was done by my 14 year old daughter, C.

Both Xcode and Android Studio have their advantages. Xcode is so much more polished, but I cannot get use the constraint system for layouts and it’s a lot of black magic. Android Studio is still in it’s early stages, but it’s getting better and better after every release.

One of the biggest reasons Android development is fun for me, is that I have the source code for the entire platform. When I am trying to understand how a built in widget or library works, I can Cmd-B and jump right to the source code of any Android library!! It’s very liberating to be able to know how everything works under the hood. Also the layout is fantastic to work with because Android always had to support many different (1000+) types of devices.

I will continue to develop for both platforms, but Android is my current favorite

Category: android development

What’s new

Interesting Facts About The Podcast Ecosystem