hello, Suleyman!

how can I help you today?

Hello Mark!

I have a couple of stupid questions :)

there are no stupid questions here

stupid answers from me, well... :-)

I'm on a later stage of my application and I am trying to provide different resources for different screen sizes. Because of the nature of my layouts, I'm more concerned with height than the width of the device, can I use only "smallest height" as the only resource qualifier? Or should I use "smallest width" anyways?

there is no "smallest height" resource qualifier

there is current height, current width, and smallest width

oh, I may have gotten lost in the documentation. What about available height? Is that a good choice for me, or should I still go for the smallest width?

sorry, I used "current" when I should have used "available" in my previous statement

you are certainly welcome to use available height, and that is probably what you want here

smallest width is the same regardless of whether the device is portrait or landscape, and it serves as a general "how big is this thing, anyway?" guide

available height depends upon the actual orientation

and the device is taller in portrait

so if you are concerned that your layout will not fit or make appropriate use of the vertical space, you probably want to use the available-height resource set qualifier

Got it, so then I guess I would have to use smallest height in portrait, and smallest width in landscape to achieve best results

possibly -- it really depends on what you're doing with your layouts, and whether you really need to tailor for all those scenarios

Yep, maybe I'm just overthinking it

Will have to experiment and see

Thanks Mark! I needed someone else's view on this problem, as I have been postponing this work for a long time :D

happy to help!

My second question is more opinion based

I’ve been wanting to implement the blur effect in my application for a long time. I found a couple of libraries, but also discovered render script which achieves the same thing but obviously is a bit harder. My question is, what would you personally recommend? I tend to be very careful with external libraries.

to be honest, I have no idea

do you mean that you want to blur some JPEG image?

(or PNG, WebP, etc.)

I have a simple ConstraintView that hosts a couple of icons, and I want to blur the background of the ConstraintView

OK, but where is the background coming from?

As of now it's just a shape drawable

um, OK

personally, I would use a library, as RenderScript is not well documented

but if you want to just look at a library, see how they do it, and roll your own, you could do that too

there are a bunch of open source libraries for that task: https://android-arsenal.com/tag/176

Yeah, you are right, I couldn't find a lot on RenderScript. And thanks a lot for the link! I think I'll try some of those libraries.

I guess you have to rely more on external libraries, especially with Android

it depends on what you are doing but, yes, on the whole, Google tries to keep the framework SDK relatively lean

Do you find it frustrating sometimes? That sometimes seemingly simple things have to be manually implemented

if by "manually implemented" you mean "use a library", that does not frustrate me

if by "manually implemented" you mean "not provided in the Android SDK", the SDK is made up of two parts: the framework and Google-supplied libraries

the problem with the framework is that it is baked into the firmware, and Android devices don't get many (or sometimes any) updates

so libraries -- whether Google-supplied or independently-authored -- are better where possible, so you have consistent implementations across devices and can update them for bug fixes, etc.

hmm, I see. That is true. I guess it's an advantage as well, since those libraries can be easily updated

right

Thank you very much for your time Mark

you're welcome!

And thanks for enduring my stupid talk :)

Have a great day!

neither of those questions were stupid!

you too!

Thank you :D See you!