This post was meant to be an internal note, but we decided to think aloud and open it up for broader discussion in the community. Your feedback would be highly appreciated.

Facebook’s Stetho makes it possible to inspect native Android apps in Chrome Developer Tools. Its latest release added view inspection support, which is really handy when combined with Mirror. You can quickly preview layout changes on the device, and at the same time browse view hierarchy using Stetho – without rebuilding or re-deploying the app.

We use Mirror to build Mirror itself and other apps. It has permanently changed our workflow for building Android UI. As one of our users told us, we “can’t imagine making a UI without it”.

If you haven’t tried Kotlin, you should really check it out, now! Kotlin gives us lambdas, null safety, better generics and many other features that help us write safe and concise code. Its seamless interoperability with Java, first-class IDE support and small footprint make it a great choice for writing Android apps – It’s simply better than Java (even Java 8). For more details, check out this comprehensive report written by Jake Wharton.

We had some fun playing with Mirror Sandbox and the open-source game Replica Island.

I am thrilled than ever to share this with you: we believe we’ve made an important step in making Android UI development easier. Yes! Mirror can now hot-swap Java classes of your custom views as you code. According to our initial testing, it usually takes 4-10 seconds to see the changes on the device – slower than resource hot-swapping with Mirror but still a lot faster than building and deploying the full APK!

Happy New Year Everyone! Just wanted to give you a sneak peek of what we’ve been working on lately. It’s still in a state of flux but I think it looks quite promising!

What you’ll see below isn’t a tutorial, but a journey of what I’ve tried and experienced. If you can learn one thing or two after watching me stumbling through the process, I’d find this writing well worth the time. All the code discussed below is available on Github, with each round being on its own branch.

Happy Birthday, Mirror!

Just cross-posting a thread on the Android development Google+ community:

TL;DR: Mirror 1.2 introduces three premium features: initial fragment support, transparent overlay and “mirror/res” directory, useful features that help you build layouts and hi-fi prototypes more quickly. Get Mirror now.

TL;DR - Use Mirror and Dropbox to collaborate on UI tasks remotely. Does it sound useful? Leave your comments in this G+ thread.

It’s time to build better design tools for the next generation of mobile user interfaces.  Why? Wireframing and static mock tools were designed for the old school desktop experience. There is a clear gap between what these tools can effectively express and the much more dynamic, tangible and intimate mobile experience.