April 2020

There were 2 posts published in April 2020 (this is page 1 of 1).

Android Device Mirroring and Recording

Mirroring and Recording what is on your physical Android Device to your computer isn’t trivial, but is an important skill to have as a developer. Being able to share and record what you see on your Android screen is super helpful for live demos, your GitHub PRs, and blog posts. There are a lot of ways to do this, but there is no perfect way of doing it.  I’ll walk you through my flow in this post.

I used Vysor for a long time, and think it’s a great tool to use to mirror your device onto your computer.  Vysor is really easy to use, but the free version does have feature limitations such as mirroring quality, and advertisements every 15 minutes. When I tried scrcpy with my development setup, I found that for me it worked the best out of any of the other tools to do this.

See the scrcpy GitHub page for all the instructions, but if you are on a Mac, already have “adb” configured, and have homebrew, then just run brew install scrcpy.  After it’s installed you can just type “scrcpy” into your terminal and it’ll launch device mirroring.

Now that you have your Android device mirroring on your computer, you need to record it.  There are a lot of tools that allow you to screen record into a GIF, but I use Kap.  You can launch Kap via the menu bar with this icon:

Then select an area of your screen manually,

… or choose an open application window.

After you are done recording, stop the recording with the button in the menu bar.

Trim your content, select resolution, frames per second (FPS), export format (GIF, MP4), and export!

Drag and drop the file into your GitHub PR.  NOTE: 10MB is the limit for image attachments in a PR, so adjust your frames per second and image resolution to find the right size.

Your PR has a GIF of your device! 🎉 This makes your PR a lot easier to understand to a reviewer, and anyone looking back at this PR in the future.

Conclusion

Adding GIFs to PRs and blog posts really keep readers engaged.  It especially did if you are actually reading this far 😎.  I hope my you find my recommendations something that help your Android development and content creation!

Links:

Companion Video on AsyncAndroid

Where Should I Put Kotlin Code in an Android Project?

Based on the results of a poll of 371 Android developers, the majority of responses endorse using “src/main/java” for Kotlin code in Android only projects.  My answer is always it depends, but let’s see why you would use “src/main/java” the majority of the time, and why you’d want to use “src/main/kotlin” in some cases.

Why src/main/java?

79% of people say it should go in “src/main/java”.  Here’s why:

  • The official documentation Android Developer Documentation recommends it, and shows additional configuration you must add to support a “src/main/kotlin” source set. 
    android {
   sourceSets {
       main.java.srcDirs += 'src/main/kotlin'
   }
}
  • When you create a new project Kotlin project in Android Studio, it uses “src/main/java” as the location for your Kotlin code.
  • I personally really like it for the reason that all of your source is in a single place, making it easier to find related code in a project mixed with Java.  This can help maintain consistency to have all your code in one location for any project that has or had Java code in the past.
  • There are no longer issues with the Kotlin Gradle Plugin which prevented you from mixing Kotlin and Java code in the same directory.

Why src/main/kotlin?

21% of people say it should go in  “src/main/kotlin”.  Here’s why:

  • Some projects like the clean separation of the languages into different directories.  While this is nice idea, from a pragmatic standpoint, having all your code in a single place is the ideal for discovery and browsing in my opinion.
  • Some projects are 100% Kotlin, so having this directory structure clearly calls this is a single to only write code in Kotlin.  This comes with the configuration overhead of each module, but if you share Gradle config between multiple projects, you’d only have to do this once.
  • OkHttp does it, but realize this is because it’s a Kotlin only project that is meant to be used on multiple platforms (including the JVM & Android).

Kotlin Source Sets beyond Android

The answers above only apply for Android only projects.  Kotlin is more than just a programming language used on Android.  It’s being used for Kotlin Multiplatform to create code that runs on iOS, it’s used in Kotlin Native to get blazing fast, low level speed and Kotlin JS to run in your Node server or web application.

You can see how some Kotlin Multiplatform projects are using source source sets such as “commonMain” where common code used for all platforms is kept, and then you can have additional source sets like “iosMain” for platform specific implementations.

I’m not going to pretend that I’m a Kotlin Multiplatform expert, but check out the official documentation, and the KaMPKit Github Repo from TouchLab to see a sample project of Kotlin Multiplatform.