Author: adityastic

This author has written 2 articles
Read more about the article Using Fastlane to Release the Badge Magic Android App on Playstore and F-droid

Using Fastlane to Release the Badge Magic Android App on Playstore and F-droid

fastlane is the easiest way to automate beta deployments and releases for Android apps. We are going to see how we used fastlane in fossasia/badge-magic-android to automate almost everything inside our project. Fastlane Configuration In Badge Magic, fastlane is integrated to deploy apps on Playstore as well as F Droid. This is a very straightforward method to manage both things from a single perspective. This is the hierarchy of the fastlane folder and it specifies the following: Metadata: This folder holds the information regarding the project and every other resource such as images, changelogs, descriptions. Every time we publish anything using the fastlane command, it checks the files and uploads the changes on every build. AppFile: json_key_file("./scripts/fastlane.json") # Path to the json secret file - Follow https://docs.fastlane.tools/actions/supply/#setup to get one package_name("org.fossasia.badgemagic") # e.g. com.krausefx.app AppFile is responsible for specifying the path of the google json and the package name of the project. Fastfile:  This is by far the most important file which handles almost everything with respect to scripting. Let’s have a look in more detail. Fastfile Fastfile contains all the code required to run lanes and define the tasks that need to be performed. In this file, we first define the platform we are going to work on. In our case it is android, therefore:  default_platform(:android) Let’s create a lane which builds the aab package for our deployment. We can specify the gradle task with the type which needs to be performed when we run a specific lane. lane :buildAAB do gradle(task: "bundle",build_type: "Release") end Let's create another lane which uploads the aab package from our build directly to the play store server.  lane :uploadToPlaystore do upload_to_play_store(track:"alpha",aab:"apk/badge-magic-master-app.aab") end This uploads the aab present in the specified directory to the playstore. So finally our final Fastfile looks like this: default_platform(:android) platform :android do lane :buildAAB do gradle(task: "bundle",build_type: "Release") end lane :uploadToPlaystore do upload_to_play_store(track: "alpha",aab:"apk/badge-magic-master-app.aab") end end Conclusion Fastlane is amazing and it automates almost everything for you. Fastfile is written in ruby and you can code lane dependencies, condition builds and anything you can think of when it comes to build automation. Using fastlane we integrated 2 app stores without any hassle or code duplication. Ressources Fastlane docs, fastlane team, https://docs.fastlane.tools/Fastlane for Android, March 15th 2019, Chan Lo, https://medium.com/open-knowledge/fastlane-for-android-automate-everything-part-i-ad42bbb15365Fastlane + CircleCI, March 18th 2019, Chan Bo, https://medium.com/open-knowledge/fastlane-circleci-for-android-part-1-471e29b968b2

Continue ReadingUsing Fastlane to Release the Badge Magic Android App on Playstore and F-droid
Read more about the article Creating Custom Widgets in Badge Magic Android

Creating Custom Widgets in Badge Magic Android

In this blog, we are going to have a look on how I created this badge preview in fossasia/badge-magic-android.  What is Canvas? Canvas is a class in Android that performs 2D drawing of different objects onto the screen. The saying “a blank canvas” is very similar to what a Canvas object is on Android. It is basically, an empty space to draw onto. Canvas Coordinate System The coordinate system of the Android canvas starts in the top left corner, where [0,0] represents that point. The y axis is positive downwards, and x axis positive towards the right. Some basics of Canvas, lets see how we drew this Preview Badge. The Badge consists of only 2 components: Rounded Rectangle ( Background )Normal Rectangles ( LED Lights ) Let’s see how we create rounded rectangles in android.  // Draw Background canvas.drawRoundRect(bgBounds, 25f, 25f, bgPaint) Using drawRoundRect() we can easily create the badge background. 25f specified is the corner radius of the rectangle. The LED Lights are just drawable resources which are used according to the current state of the LED. private fun drawLED(condition: Boolean, canvas: Canvas, xValue: Int, yValue: Int) { if (condition) { ledEnabled.bounds = cells[xValue].list[yValue] ledEnabled.draw(canvas) } else { ledDisabled.bounds = cells[xValue].list[yValue] ledDisabled.draw(canvas) } } This function draws the LED Lights if the condition is satisfied. When we consider a custom view, we need to consider the changes which occur according. These layout changes are to be controlled and maintained accordingly, Let’s see how we manage the positioning of the led lights for every android device. Spoiler: Simple 10th Grade Maths xD override fun onLayout(changed: Boolean, left: Int, top: Int, right: Int, bottom: Int) { super.onLayout(changed, left, top, right, bottom) val offset = 30 val singleCell = (right - left - (offset * 3)) / badgeWidth val offsetXToAdd: Int = ((((right - offset).toFloat() - (left + offset).toFloat()) - (singleCell * badgeWidth)) / 2).toInt() + 1 cells = mutableListOf() for (i in 0 until badgeHeight) { cells.add(Cell()) for (j in 0 until badgeWidth) { cells[i].list.add(Rect( (offsetXToAdd * 2) + j * singleCell, (offsetXToAdd * 2) + i * singleCell, (offsetXToAdd * 2) + j * singleCell + singleCell, (offsetXToAdd * 2) + i * singleCell + singleCell )) } } bgBounds = RectF((offsetXToAdd).toFloat(), (offsetXToAdd).toFloat(), ((singleCell * badgeWidth) + (offsetXToAdd * 3)).toFloat(), ((singleCell * badgeHeight) + (offsetXToAdd * 3)).toFloat()) } We create an offset which is nothing but the gap from the screen edge to the badge itself, now we need to have gaps on both sides of the badge and we also leave half the offset inside the badge which is the difference between the badge background and the LED starting point, hence we calculate the value of single cells by:  val singleCell = (right - left - (offset * 3)) / badgeWidth We minus the no of pixels on the right of the display to the left, to get the width of the actual screen. Then we minus the padding from the left and right which is offset * 3…

Continue ReadingCreating Custom Widgets in Badge Magic Android