Despite the impressive hardware of the first Android phones (T-Mobile G1 and ADP1) writing efficient mobile applications is not always straightforward. Android applications rely on automatic memory management handled by Dalvik’s garbage collector which…
Android applications are, at least on the T-Mobile G1, limited to 16 MB of heap. It’s both a lot of memory for a phone and yet very little for what some developers want to achieve. Even if you do not plan on using all of this memory, you should use as …
ListView is one of Android’s most widely used widgets. It is rather easy to use, very flexible and incredibly powerful. ListView can also be difficult to understand at times.
One of the most common issues with ListView happens when you try to use a cus…
Android offers a very powerful and yet easy to use tool called intents. An intent can be use to turn applications into high-level libraries and make code re-use something even better than before. The Android Home screen and AnyCut use intents extensive…
Designing and developing user interfaces for Android is very different from doing so in a regular desktop environment. Because Android runs applications on mobile devices, application designers and developers must deal with numerous constraints that ar…
I’m pleased to announce that a new open source sample application—called Photostream—has been added to the apps-for-android project. Photostream is a simple photos browser and viewer for Flickr. All you need to use it is a Flickr screen name or use…