App Polish

Often we complete the functional aspect of an Android project, and when it comes to adding some sparkle to the UI to really make it appealing to the user inspiration can be a little lacking. In this article we’ll start of with a really functional but boring app, and turn it in to something much…

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 6

In the previous article we looked at frame rates, and explored how we can measure them by adding some simple benchmarking logging. In this article we’ll look at implementing our dynamic blurring so that we can animate things, and optimising things to improve our framerate.

Blurring Images – Part 5

So far in this series there have been quite a few mentions of frame rates, and assertions that we want to keep our frame rates as high as possible. In this article we’ll look a little closer at how we can measure frame rates, and explore how changes in our layouts and views can affect…

Blurring Images – Part 4

Previously in this series we’ve looked at blurring an image using RenderScript, and a technique for analysing performance to work out where the bottlenecks are in the process. We found that the actual bur operation was extremely quick in RenderScript, but we did have an overhead of marshalling bitmaps from the Java memory space across…

Blurring Images – Part 3

In the previous article we took a look at wiring up our blur method so that it was appended to the layout phase to ensure that it was called only following a layout change, and not in onDraw(). So why shouldn’t we call it in onDraw()? In this article we’ll perform some benchmarking which will…

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…

TextClock Version 2 – Part 6

In the previous article I covered the various solutions that I tried to resolve an issue that had developed within TextClock. The time is actually updating anything up to a minute later than it should be, and the problem was caused by internal changes to AlarmManager which were introduced in KitKat. In this article in…