Mobile Zone Link Roundup (Apr. 19)

For a look at what's been happening outside of the Mobile Zone, we've assembled a collection of links from around the web covering all the tutorials, tools, new releases, rants, and raves you might have missed over the past couple of weeks:

Tutorials & Tools

How to Debug iOS Apps with APItools

APItools has a couple of great, as yet undocumented features. One of them is proxy mode. You can set up APItools just like the proxy you would set in a browser or a phone.

Android UI: MATCH_PARENT vs. FILL_PARENT

Here's the short of it: unless you are compiling against Froyo (API 8), please stop using FILL_PARENT to specify layout_width and layout_height. Use MATCH_PARENT. They have the same integer value, but FILL_PARENT is deprecated and the name itself is misleading. Please, use MATCH_PARENT.

Go "golang" and Android

One realm where Go has been considered the odd man out, however, is Android development. Which is a bit strange given their shared Google lineage.

Dependency Injection, iOS, and You

The reason brittle object graphs are bad is that you cannot easily replace parts of the application. If an object expects to ask its environment for a load of other objects around it, then you cannot simply tell it that it should be using another object. Dependency injection fixes that. It tells the object, “Hey, these are the objects you should work with,” so that if we want to change the collaborators we just inject different things.

RoboVM

Create native iOS apps in Java. Truly native iOS apps using native UIs and with full hardware access. Reuse your Java language and tools skills.

News & Opinion

Eclipse is Dead for Android Development and I Helped Kill it 

A year has passed since Google introduced Android Studio IDE at the Google I/0 2013 Conference. A month later, we wrote an article on how Eclipse would slowly, but ultimately lose it's position and recommended switching to Android Studio. Over 25,000 people read this article. Were we right?

Android Twice as Stable as iOS: Benchmark Report

Contrary to the notion that iOS is very stable while the messy Android crashes too often due to inherent bugs, a recent survey by Crittercism reveals a handful of completely surprising facts and findings.

Android's Overblown Fragmentation Problem Revisited

Two years ago I declared that Android’s supposed “fragmentation problem” was overblown.

I was working on Glassboard when I wrote that post, and Glassboard hadn’t become a Google Play “staff pick” yet so it still had a fairly small audience. These days I work on WordPress for Android which has a much larger audience, so I figured I’d revisit the fragmentation topic.

Apple Says iOS, OSX and “Key Web Services” Not Affected by Heartbleed

Apple said Thursday that its mobile, desktop and Web services weren’t affected by a major flaw in a set of security software used by hundreds of thousands of websites.

The Right Way to Ask Users for iOS Permissions

Cluster is the first native mobile app I’ve designed, and the experience has taught me a lot about things to consider that aren’t necessarily a concern on the web. When creating a web app, you’re just building a page a user visits. But when creating a native experience, you’re not only asking them to download something but also probably asking them to give you access to their location or personal data. It’s a completely different relationship.