In a previous article I talked about a smart way to use Retrofit library. This is a great library but recently I had to manage offline data and I thought 'Hey, it would be great to download data and save it into a database to create some sort of cache :)'. I found a lot of ORM library such as GreenDAO, OrmLite, SugarORM and ActiveAndroid. I wanted a simple and powerful library. I've chosen ActiveAndroid library and I will explain how to use it with Retrofit.

Retrofit library is a type-safe REST client for Android and Java created by Square Open Source. With this library you can request the webservices of a REST api with POST, GET and more. This library is awesome and very useful, but you need a good architecture and a good practice to use it as best as possible.

HelloSMS is an awesome app with a design concept that I like very much ! So I wanted to know how to create the same menu and after some digging I found a way to do it. It was a little bit difficult so I will explain here how to achieve the same menu with interaction.

Manage actionbar might be very difficult when you want to have some custom behavior. If you want to change the color, the visibility or to add animations with a standard actionbar it can be done in a very simple, by following a few steps and by combining some tricks with the Otto library. Do not forget that this tutorial is made for applications using API 14+.

Octopress is a framework designed by Brandon Mathis for Jekyll, the blog aware static site generator powering Github Pages. To start blogging with Jekyll, you have to write your own HTML templates, CSS, Javascripts and set up your configuration. But with Octopress all that is already taken care of. Clone or fork Octopress, install dependencies and the theme, and you're set.