// the find
romainguy/road-trip
A sample Android application that demonstrates how to implement various visual effects.
A 2013 Android demo app by Romain Guy (ex-Google, now at Samsung Research) showing custom drawing tricks: animated SVG path tracing, B&W-to-color transitions, parallax, stacked card scroll, and action bar fade. It's a code reference, not a library — you read it to understand how the effects work, then port the technique into your own app.
The SVG path tracing implementation (SvgHelper + IntroView) is genuinely instructive — parsing paths and animating PathMeasure along them was not obvious at the time and the code is concise enough to follow. Romain Guy knew Android internals deeply; the scroll tracking views show how to hook into scroll events without fighting the framework. The parallax and stacked-card effects are clean enough that they still come up cited in Stack Overflow answers. Source is well-organized for a sample: one module, minimal dependencies, Apache license.
Last commit 2017, targets Android 4.4 — the action bar API it demonstrates was deprecated in favor of Toolbar years ago, and the Gradle files will reject modern AGP without manual surgery. Java only, no Kotlin, which means the idioms are dated and anyone working in a modern Android project will need to mentally translate. No tests, no documentation beyond the README and a blog post link. The blog post itself may 404. This is a snapshot of 2013 Android UI craft, and that world no longer exists.