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Nobody likes staring at an empty screen while content loads. A well-crafted animation helps people stay engaged while they wait. This tutorial will show how loading animations can be done with ease.

Java has some idiosyncrasies of its own and design choices that can make it rather verbose. While Java is a mature and performant programming language, developers frequently need to write boilerplate code that bring little or no real value other than complying with some set of constraints and conventions.

In this article, Toptal Freelance Software Engineer Miguel García López shows how Project Lombok can help dramatically reduce the amount of boilerplate code that needs to be written in a Java application.

Android provides many ways of creating and managing threads, and third-party libraries exist to make that even easier. However, with so many options, choosing the right approach can be quite confusing.

In this article, Toptal Freelance Software Engineer Eliran Goshen discusses some common scenarios in Android development that involve threading and how each of the scenarios can be dealt with.

Using Mockito is not just a matter of adding another dependency. It requires changing how you think about your unit tests while removing a lot of boilerplate. In this article, we cover multiple mock interfaces, listening invocations, matchers, and argument captors, and see firsthand how Mockito makes your tests cleaner and easier to understand.

Developing a mobile app for multiple platforms can be quite costly. Implementing the same functionalities in multiple programming languages and dealing with a plethora of unique libraries for each platform requires a massive amount of time and knowledge.

In this article, Toptal Freelance Software Engineer Sylvain Gravel talks about Xamarin and its companion technologies that let you build mobile applications for multiple platforms without compromising familiarity, performance, and uniqueness.

Dealing with concurrency in Android through imperative-style programming can be quite the hassle. RxJava, a library for reactive and functional style programming, allows concurrency constructs to be modeled in a reactive way in Android’s non-reactive world.

In this article, Toptal Freelance Software Engineer Christopher Arriola shows us how RxJava can be incrementally introduced to existing Android projects and leveraged to simplify concurrency.

When done well, emotional design increases engagement and can elicit an emotion that will deliver a positive response in users.

The best PHP framework is rarely determined by technology alone. Compare Laravel and Symfony through the lens of architecture, scalability, team dynamics, and long-term business needs.

Ahead of Snap’s IPO, we take a look at whether the rumoured valuation makes sense, and find that whilst overall market concerns regarding DAU growth are justified, the market is likely under-valuing the company’s ARPU growth prospects. For us, Snap is a Buy.

Why use the same tired icon sets for every single project? Follow this guide to learn how to add visual depth and intrigue to your icons and make them unique to the product they represent.

Modern mobile application development requires a well thought-out plan for keeping user data in sync across various devices. This is a thorny problem with many gotchas and pitfalls, but users expect the feature and expect it to work well. For iOS and macOS, Apple provides a robust toolkit, called CloudKit API, which allows developers targeting Apple platforms to solve this synchronization problem.

In this article, Toptal Software Engineer Paul Young demonstrate how to use CloudKit to keep a user’s data in sync between multiple clients.