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Tor Norbye

@tornorbye.bsky.social

1.6K followers 363 following 81 posts

I lead engineering for Android developer tools and libraries at Google. Opinions my own.

Tor Norbye @tornorbye.bsky.social · 30/05/2025

I recommend setting up an API key (check the Gemini settings in Studio); that switches to a model which seems to do a better job with function calls. If not you sometimes have situations like the following :-)

A screenshot showing a snippet of a conversation I had with Gemini in Android Studio where I had asked it to help fix some code, and it asked me to respond with the contents of the file in question -- instead of just reading it itself. I'm reminding it it can do that, which it then proceeded to do.

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Tor Norbye @tornorbye.bsky.social · 30/05/2025

The new agent in Android Studio is enabled in yesterday's canary build! This build doesn't have all the tools hooked up that I showed in the I/O demo last week (agent here: youtu.be/KXKP2tDPW4Y?...), such as the Gradle awareness -- and it also doesn't have the Upgrade Agent yet. Hopefully soon!

Screenshot of the new agent tab in Gemini in Android Studio showing the input prompt and sample queries

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Tor Norbye @tornorbye.bsky.social · 29/05/2025

My favorite "hidden" feature on Android is turning on the screen zoom by long pressing both volume keys. I use it all the time to read tiny text when apps don't properly support or limit zooming...

Screenshot of the magnification shortcut setting on Android which is how you can enter a mode where pinch gestures magnifies everything

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Tor Norbye @tornorbye.bsky.social · 15/05/2025

Gearing up for Google I/O next week. The team is super hard at work putting the final touches on things for @jamaleason.bsky.social and I to present. Hope you can tune in! io.google/2025/explore...

Screenshot of the web page for next week's "What's new in Android development tools" talk at Google I/O, airing Wednesday May 21, 2025 at 10am Pacific time.

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Tor Norbye @tornorbye.bsky.social · 22/03/2025

Forgot to post about this last week, but we have a new episode of ADB up where we delve into Compose performance with @intelligibabble.bsky.social and @chuckjaz.bsky.social (and of course @romainguy.dev ) There are a lot of cool optimizations on the way! www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fr_e...

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Tor Norbye @tornorbye.bsky.social · 27/02/2025

The traffic on the freeway this morning was so slow that Google Maps concluded I must have stopped at a nearby business.... 😂😭

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Tor Norbye @tornorbye.bsky.social · 08/12/2024

It's fun to look at some of the screenshots in the old announcement blog post to see how much it's changed over the years!

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Tor Norbye @tornorbye.bsky.social · 08/12/2024

Today marks the ten year anniversary for Android Studio! 🎉 We released version 1.0 on the morning of December 8th 2014: android-developers.googleblog.com/2014/12/andr...

Screenshot of Android Studio 1.0 in dark theme with the source editor on the right, and multi-configuration layout preview on the right showing a layout across a variety of devices.

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Tor Norbye @tornorbye.bsky.social · 05/12/2024

And now a tsunami!

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Tor Norbye @tornorbye.bsky.social · 05/12/2024

Quake!

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Tor Norbye @tornorbye.bsky.social · 27/11/2024

Kotlin 2.1 is out! kotlinlang.org/docs/whatsne... I'm excited about better dollar substitution in raw strings! In lint's test DSL there's a workaround for it. Look at the screenshot -- unescaped $'s? But how? If you look carefully, it's a lookalike! cs.android.com/search?q=%22...

A screenshot of a lint unit test with a multiline literal string, seemingly using a single dollar sign in the string. But it's not a real dollar sign, it's a unicode lookalike.

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Tor Norbye @tornorbye.bsky.social · 12/11/2024

I stopped using Twitter two years ago, deleted my tweets and set my profile to private. Maybe I'd return one day? But that appears unlikely now, so I just pulled the trigger and deleted my 15 year old account. Since I've been absent for 2 years, I already know I won't miss it!

Screenshot of "account deactived" screen shown once I clicked to delete my account.

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