The Big Nerd Ranch Blog

Adding machine learning and AI into mobile apps became easier with Google’s Firebase MLKit. Last year, [Google democratized AI](https://www.bignerdranch.com/blog/google-io-2017-ai-democratized/). This year, they commoditized it.

Use lateinit for view properties in activities and fragments. While lazy is appealing, it has some rough corners.

It has always been possible to use Kotlin on the server. Numerous Java server frameworks happily run any JVM bytecode, whether the code was originally written in Java, Kotlin, Scala or even JRuby. But if you are an Android developer who wants to build simple JSON APIs for your apps, why not use a framework that was written in Kotlin by people who brought you Kotlin?

As developers, we usually think of security from the perspective of the platform and applications. But we should not forget the humans for whom we create our applications.

We [talked about the ConstraintLayout](/blog/constraintlayout-vs-auto-layout-how-do-they-compare/) in a previous post and compared it to Apple’s Auto Layout. Since then, ConstraintLayout has gone from alpha to beta, and the latest version packs further speed improvements and fixes. Furthermore, Android Studio 2.3 made improvements to the editor. In this post, we’ll explore some examples of user interfaces you can create with ConstraintLayout.

ConstraintLayout and Auto Layout use the same underlying algorithm. How do they differ?

Apple has been using machine learning in their products for a long time—Siri answers our questions and entertains us, iPhoto recognizes faces in our photos, Mail app detects spam messages.

As app developers, we have access to some capabilities exposed by Apple’s APIs such as [face detection](https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/documentation/GraphicsImaging/Conceptual/CoreImaging/ci_detect_faces/ci_detect_faces.html), and starting with iOS 10, we’ll gain a high-level API for speech recognition and SiriKit.

Code completion can improve your productivity by reducing how much you have to type, but there are situations when a more powerful tool is needed. Thanks to Android Studio and IntelliJ, live templates make it much easier to focus on just the things you care about.