Kristen Halper, Author at Surface Duo Blog

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Foldable ExoPlayer video… plus trivia

March 31st, 2022

Hello Android developers! Video is an important element of many different types of mobile apps, including those designed for viewing TV and movie shows, livestreaming, social sharing, voice calling, meetings, training, and anything in-between. Large screen and foldable devices are ideal for this type of content because there’s ...

Write foldable tests quickly with Test Kit

March 24th, 2022

Hello Android developers! This week, we’re super excited to announce that we’ve released the first version of our foldable Test Kit. The Test Kit currently includes two testing utility libraries, one for layouts built with views and another for layouts built with Jetpack Compose, and we’re looking forward to adding more ...

Jetpack Compose UI testing

March 3rd, 2022

Hello Jetpack Compose developers! We’re excited to announce that UI tests have been added to all our Compose samples! We learned a lot throughout the process of adding these tests, so we hope this week’s blog post makes it easier for you to start testing your own Compose layouts, especially when testing for compatibility ...

Jetpack Compose WindowState preview

January 20th, 2022

Hello Jetpack Compose developers! This week, we’d like to announce the release of WindowState, a new utility library that’s part of our Compose SDK. Our goal was to provide easy access to all the window information provided by the Jetpack Window Manager library and to simplify the logic required to enhance your apps for large ...

Get started with Jetpack Compose

November 18th, 2021

Hello (future) Jetpack Compose developers! This week, we want to talk about how to get started on building applications with Jetpack Compose. A few of us on the Surface Duo Developer Experience team recently began learning Compose, so we’d like to share some advice and resources with you. To read more about the work we’ve...

Jetpack Compose Navigation Rail

November 4th, 2021

Hello Jetpack Compose developers! This week, we released a new sample that demonstrates how to use the NavigationRail component with large screen and foldable devices. These guidelines were also introduced recently in the Microsoft Surface Duo Design Kit 2.1. Create a NavigationRail with Compose We first blogged about NavigationRail in ...

Erase pen handling code with the Ink SDK

October 7th, 2021

Hello Android developers! We’ve just updated one of our existing samples – TwoNote – to include the Ink SDK preview introduced in March and updated in July. TwoNote now also uses the Jetpack Window Manager library to provide foldable support. If you want to check out the updated sample for yourself, this is the perfect ...

Noteworthy new Surface Duo app sample

August 27th, 2020

Hello Microsoft Surface Duo developers, Parker and I are just about to finish up our internship on the Surface Duo Developer Experience team and we’ve had a great time! Throughout the past 12 weeks, we’ve worked on building sample apps, contributing to documentation, supporting internal and external customers, and just learning a lot ...

Kristen Halper

SW/FW Engineer, Surface Duo Developer Experience