Goodbye September, hello to the new month and our new favourite libraries! We’ve all experienced a moment in which a problem, that occupied so much of our time (and nerves!), was solved in as little effort as adding a dependency to the project. This month, following last month’s trend, COBE honours the hard working people that provide to us such solutions, so that we don’t have to bang our head against a wall as often. Let’s take a look!
1. Exynap
If you’ve heard about this library, it’s clear why it has come up. Let’s admit, we’re all a bit lazy sometimes. By fully generating prebuilt templates like AlertDialogs to reduce boilerplate we have to write, this tool nurtures our laziness, so it could become something rather magical. Admire it’s beauty :
2. TestButler
A personal butler, at your service! He may not make a nice breakfast with some orange juice and bring it to your bed every morning, but it certainly will make your life feel gloomy without him.
There comes a time in every developer’s life (I hope), when he/she starts writing tests. UI tests are very much neglected as they may be hard to wrap your head around, and often fail because the screen went to sleep, Wi-Fi decided to disconnect itself, or some other nuisance that makes it even more complex than it is.
TestButler will hand you solutions for these issues on a silver platter! You can disable crash and ANR popups during tests, set the Wi-Fi to persist, set screen orientation, handle location services, and even set device’s Locale!
3. Stag
If you thought it’d be a library about deers, you were wrong! It’s actually an acronym for Speedy Type Adapter Generator. It brings a new angle to GSON parsing in Android, as most libraries or parsing operations use reflection, whereas Stag doesn’t! As such it can improve performance by a few dozen percent. Doesn’t seem like much if a parse takes 50–100ms, but once added up with hundreds of requests, it might make your users happier (even if they don’t know it)!
4. Icicle
Brr.. I get the chills just thinking about winter. But don’t let this library’s name fool you, it might bring some warmth to your heart once you get to know it.
What it does is saving us from having to write boilerplate code for each activity/fragment and it’s instanceState. Just annotate the fields you wish to save, and you’re good to go! Have a look :
@Freeze
int mAwesomeInt;@Freeze
String mAwesomeString;@Override
public void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) {
super.onCreate(savedInstanceState);
Icicle.thaw(this, savedInstanceState);
}@Override
protected void onSaveInstanceState(Bundle outState) {
Icicle.freeze(this, outState);
super.onSaveInstanceState(outState);
}
5. GreenCoffee
Ahh coffee… The material behing almost any code ever produced… If a sudden urge to make yourself one hits you, trust me, you’re not the only one. Coming back to the topic of UI tests, GreenCoffee works with Espresso and Cucumber (seriously, I’m not talking about drinks and food), to help build and document your instrumentation tests. Their Github example shows how you can write a description for each test case or method that helps you understand the flow of the test, even if you see it for the first time.
There you go, our top 5 picks for the month of October. Are some of those already on your lists of favourites? Post below in the comment section, and if we like your pick, it might pop up in next month’s top 5 list! And if you liked this, check out our newest iOS libs picks too! :)
