More Drawables – Part 1

In recent articles on Styling Android I have diverged a little from pure UI and covered some more subtle aspects to improve your UX. In this series we’re going to return to something that was covered in the very first post to Styling Android: Drawables. Previously we have looked at how shape drawables can be…

Memory Cache – Part 4

In the previous part of this series we implemented a simple memory cache based upon WeakReference. It certainly improved performance when we were using the same image multiple times within a short period, but it is easy to predict that our cached images would not survive an intensive operation, such as an Activity transition. Also,…

Memory Cache – Part 3

In the previous part of this series we looked at why caching images may help the performance of our app, so let’s firstly look at a technique for creating a short-lived cache. The items in the cache will only survive until the next GC if they are not strongly referenced, but this can sometimes be…