Android UI Development: Tips, Tricks Techniques from Devoxx 2010 Summary

Quick summary of the most important/new tips from the Parleys talk Android UI Development: Tips, Tricks Techniques at Devoxx 2010. Now free for viewing.

13:40: tool for tracking allocations in Android via Debug.setAllocationLimit(int)

25:15: example showing the use of DDMS, Heap Analysis Tool, hprof, adb shell dumpsys meminfo

36:14: don't over-invalidate when redrawing. Only redraw what you have to. Demo shows use of traceview to detect too much being re-drawn.

44:20: (new) hierarchy viewer example. You can use Annotations to export your own values, i.e. the ones you want to check in the viewer.

48:09: you can use the ViewStub to not create your Views too early. Kindof lazy-instantiation. Uses android:inflatedId.

51:15: better way of using an ImageView (e.g icon) with a TextView inside a LinearLayout: android:drawableLeft(Top/Bottom/Right). Much more efficient because not using 3 Views.

51:45: shows use of the static analysis tool 'layoutopt'. It needs an layout XML file and it tells you what can be improved.

53:45: the one you should know by now :) Don't inflate() views in ListView.getView(), re-use. Shows a graph of performance differences if you do vs if you don't.

54:24: tip on View.setDrawingCacheEnabled(true), and explains quicky how Android uses it when you flick a ListView.