Gradle tip - What is gradle anyway?

Gradle is a build system. Android, along with the Android Studio, uses Gradle as its main build system, and adding functionality through an Android plugin. 

If you developed in the Eclipse days, than you would be familiar with Eclipse as your main build system. If you come from Web development background, than Gradle is your Grunt.

Gradle is based on the Groovy language, allowing us to write rich, scalable, scripts.

Gradle will be automatically ran with your Android Studio builds, but it can also be accessible via the command line/terminal, allowing you to integrate it easily with your CI. 

Productive Team Work With Android Designs

This post discusses the best practices to work with Android designs/graphics, and aims mostly to the process part in which all parties should work in order to achieve productive communication, save time and get to the best pixel-perfect results.

Android L (API 21) - java.lang.IllegalArgumentException: Service Intent must be explicit

Android new version - "Lollipop" (API 21) brings quite a few changes with it, but it comes with some price if you wish to target your app to that API.

When we started adapting our apps to the new API, one of the first problems we've encountered is the `IllegalArgumentException: Service Intent must be explicit`

Automatic versioning and increment using Git tags and Gradle

How do you set versions for you Android app? There are many ways at it. At the manifest, at the gradle in a "def", in a version.properties file... But, if you are looking for a cleaner way where you don't have to actually change a file, and it will continuously increment after each commit - here it is.

GCM (push notification) testing

One of the better efficient ways to communicate messages to your app is via Google's GCM service. This post is about how to test your GCM once you had it set up in your project

Inspection (lint and Intellij rules)

A developer should always check his code for Lint warnings/errors and intellij rules, and seek to minimize the amount of warnings/errors. As a team we will use a unified set of Lint rules, that will help us set the base rules for Lint checker.