Styling Android

In the previous article we discussed the Android Service architecture and looked at how to properly implement your Service to both behave well and avoid being killed by the OS or a TaskKiller. In this concluding article in this series well look at IntentService and look at ways that we can trigger UI updates from a Service.
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Previously in this series we have looked at various ways of moving slow, intensive, or blocking tasks off of the UI thread in order to keep our app responsive. The final mechanism that we’ll look at is Android services.
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In the previous article we had a look at AsyncTask as saw how it simplified the process of performing background tasks, but saw some potential pitfalls to the newbie, and also saw how it leaves the potential to leak a Context. In Honeycomb Loader was introduced and in this article we’ll have a look at what this offers us.
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Previously we looked at using standard threads to keep things off the UI thread and also covered various mechanisms for getting execution back on to the UI thread for when we need to update View objects. However our code was beginning to get quite messy with us having to define lots of Runnables in order to switch execution between threads. In this article we’ll look at AsyncTask which provides a much cleaner mechanism for updating Views.
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In the previous article in this series we looked at the UI thread and explored the reason why it is important that we keep any slow, intensive, or blocking tasks off the UI thread. In this article we’ll begin exploring the tools available to help us to achieve that.
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Regular readers of Styling Android will understand that it is dedicated to improving the look & feel (UI) and User Experience (UX) of Android apps. One particular area in which we can really frustrate our users is when the app does not respond to their touches / clicks, and it is vital that we keep our app as responsive as possible. I use the term responsive in the context of responding to the user’s actions and not as it is often used in the phrase “Responsive Web Design” to describe how your presentation adjusts to the display. In this series of articles we’ll have a look at some useful techniques for keeping your apps responsive.
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