To conclude this lesson, here are some other Libraries that many Android applications use.

• Picasso and Glide: A common problem that Android developers face is the proper use of images in their application. Including many high quality images will drastically increase your apk size, while downloading images over the network comes with memory consumption and network availability problems. Picasso and Glide are both very robust libraries that facilitate the loading, caching and displaying of Images. They include tons of amazing features, such as the ability to include placeholder images and local caching, so almost every application that includes images uses one of these libraries. Check out the documentation on Picasso and Glide.

• Butterknife:
  If you've created an app with a lot of views, then you'll know how tedious it can be to write findViewById() calls for each one, as well as to create custom onClicks for each one. These tasks pertain to Data Binding, the realm of connecting your data to the user facing views. Butterknife is a revolutionary library that uses annotations to make this much easier. Check out the documentation for some examples of how this can make your life much easier. You can even implement it in our Emojifier app if you want; check out this code branch to see how it would look.

• Timber:
  Created and maintained by the same developer who created Butterknife, Timber is a really cool tool for Logging. I'm sure you have all used the built-in Logger and know the importance of seeing information about your app in the debugger. Timber takes this further by providing a modifiable platform for all your logging needs. It contains these, and many more features:

  • Log without a TAG (Timber creates one for you)
  • Create different logging logic for Debug and Release version of your app (you probably only want to see errors in the release version)
  • Automatic error detection

  You can see this library in action in our Emojifier app here.

Must Have Libraries

Exercise Code

Exercise: TLIB.06-Exercise-AddButterknife

Exercise: TLIB.07-Exercise-AddTimber