D9's Blog

Another quick post as things here are extremely busy at the moment. Gradle 9.8.0 now supports Java 27 but should you use that - for everything? No. It wouldn't even work if you tried. I previously concluded 17 was likely the best/safest choice for most projects, but now I think 21  might be a better choice unless you are building a library. 21 in a library would force anyone using your library to target 21 as well. Another reason not to move up to 21 would be legacy dependencies. If you are using old libraries as they may not be compatible.  I think Java 21 is likely the best option for the full toolchain and build in most cases. My post from January this year -  Android - Java Version  covers the subject in some detail. The  Official Android Page  specifies a build target of  Java 17 . I believe this is for compatibility reasons and that makes a lot of sense. So Java 27... While you can't target Java 27 for Android app bytecode (Kotlin and D8/R8...

Just a quick update: I'm temporarily changing my blogger theme as I am having issues with Google Search. Expect other theme updates soon.

With the release of  1.3.0-rc01 for Material3 Adaptive, I felt it was a good time to try out a minimal example. In the same spirit, this will be a minimal blog that should help you get an example up and running ASAP. This follows on from my  Navigation 3  series which covers adaptive using Navigation3 so definitely check that out if you want to see a more detailed example (or if you just like cool cars). Dependencies Assuming you want to recreate exactly what I am doing, you just need to add the  1.3.0-rc01  detail as linked. Of course, I would recommend using the release version of 1.3.0 (or later releases) when that becomes available instead. I'll repeat them here for conveniece: dependencies { implementation "androidx.compose.material3.adaptive:adaptive:1.3.0-rc01" implementation "androidx.compose.material3.adaptive:adaptive-layout:1.3.0-rc01" implementation "androidx.compose.material3.adaptive:adaptive-navigation:1.3.0-rc01" implem...

In the previous post,  ViewModel Factory (Old vs. Newer DSL) , we talked about a more modern ViewModel factory. This practice works well, but there is something dangerous you may miss... Previous Example Take a quick look at this code below and think about where this might go wrong... companion object { private const val MODERN_UI_STATE_KEY = "modern_ui_state" @VisibleForTesting internal fun factory (name: String) = viewModelFactory { initializer { ModernDSLStyleFactoryViewModel( name = name, savedStateHandle = createSavedStateHandle () ) } } @Composable fun get ( name: String = "Modern DSL ViewModel Factory" ): ModernDSLStyleFactoryViewModel { return viewModel ( factory = factory(name)) } } The code above is safe, but that's because we're using literals... ...but if we pass in an object, things get more complicated. New Example We'll s...

Introduction / Audience I stumbled across a bug in my code and I couldn't figure out what was causing it. After tracking it down, I felt this would make a good post to highlight a rare and interesting bug. I believe this is a known bug so this post is nothing groundbreaking, but I don't think it is very widely known. The target audience is anyone from beginners to experts: For beginners, you can learn how to approach finding a difficult bug in a logical methodical manner. It will also introduce you to Kotlin Playground if you haven't seen it before.  For experts, you can test you knowledge and experience and see if you can identify the issue from the original code. Warning: This post contains bugs and cute images of bugs. The Bug The bug was, as is usually the case, hidden in a large amount of code. The Error Exception in thread "main" java.lang.NullPointerException : Cannot invoke "Node$Option.getCode()" because "it" is null So a null-pointe...

Part 3 As mentioned in Part 2 , this series is a little longer than I had originally hoped. In this third (and hopefully final) part, we will cover ViewModels with Navigation3 and make something that looks a little nicer. The code listing is quite long so I will avoid explaining the UI elements here and focus on the sections relevant to Navigation3 . If you haven't already read the previous entries and are not already familiar with Navigation3 , I strongly recommend starting with Part 1 . The main goal here is to give you a working sample to play with. This post will not go into too much detail on each of these points so you will need to read around any new subjects that come up to learn more. Notes - Saving Data One compromise I chose to make was not saving any data . You will be able to take notes for each car, but those notes will vanish when you change to another page. If you want to store those notes, please take a look at my DataStore post or my Room3 post . That should give...