In this series we’re going to build an app to view the Mandelbrot set. While this is not necessarily something that is likely to be of direct use to the majority of app developers (except for those that have a desire to develop their own Mandelbrot set viewing apps), there are some techniques that we’ll…
Category: ImageView
Data Binding – Part 3
At Google I/O 2015 a number of new Android libraries and tools were announced. One of them was the all new Data Binding library and in this series we’ll take a look at the library and explore some of the powerful features it provides.
Palette – Part 2
In the previous article we began looking at the new Palette library which was introduced as part of the Android-L developer preview (but will be available in a support library with compatibility back to API 7) which enables us to extract colour information from bitmaps. We got our image loading working so we’l now turn…
Palette – Part 1
One of the many additions being introduced in Android-L is a new library for extracting key colours from bitmaps. In this short series we’ll take a look at the new Palette library.
Blurring Images – Part 7
In the previous article we performed some simple optimisations which enormously improved the frame rate of our animations. However, we mentioned that increasing the size of the area that we wish to blur will slow the frame rate because the complexity of the blur operation will increase exponentially. In this article we’ll look at an…
Blurring Images – Part 2
Previously we looked at a method which uses RenderScript to blur the section of an image which lies within the bounds of another view. However we didn’t get as far as actually calling that method and see the blurring in action. The reason for this is that we need to think quite carefully about performance,…
Blurring Images – Part 1
There are a lot of cool effects that we can do in Android to manipulate images, and I cover some of these in my conference presentation for 2014 entitled Graphical Magic. One technique that I cover in the presentation is how to blur images and the example code uses RenderScript to perform the blur because…
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…
Memory Cache – Part 2
In the previous article we looked at the theory behind weak references. In this article we’ll look at one use-case where a simple memory cache may speed things up.