When it comes to making an app, some of the biggest struggles developers face is outside of the code itself. What should I name the app? Who is my target audience? Or the one I struggle with the most: what colors should I use in my Android application?

This last question does not have one right or wrong answer. For that reason, it is one of the hardest questions to answer. Thankfully, there are many tools out there to help you determine your applications color scheme, and these are my five favorites.

The RecyclerView.Adapter class is used to bind a dataset to a RecyclerView to be displayed to a user. As I explained in another post, RecyclerView Vs ListView, the RecyclerView.Adapter forces the use of the ViewHolder pattern, which may be hard to understand when switching to a RecyclerView from a ListView. In this short post I am going to reference my MovieAdapter class from my Swipe-To-Dismiss example, and break it down to explain the required implementations and how to use the RecyclerView adapter.

The backbone of Material Design is to design your user interface in a way that is simple and intuitive for users, in the same way we use our intuition with real life materials. One of the many ways this is achieved is through the use of elevation in Android UI components, demonstrated here:

In my last post I broke down the differences between the RecyclerView and a ListView. One of the benefits of the RecyclerView that I touched on was the ItemTouchHelper. This class is used to handle the Swipe-To-Dismiss and Drag-N-Drop behaviors of a RecyclerView. In this post I am going to teach you how to swipe to dismiss RecyclerView items using the sample application seen here:

Before continuing this post, I recommend that you read my previous one on Swipe To Dismiss RecyclerView Items as this will build upon the ItemTouchHelper class discussed there. Once you’ve done that, come back to this short post and learn how to drag and drop RecyclerView items like this: