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.
Tag: androiddev
Background Tasks – Part 4
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…
Background Tasks – Part 3
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…
Background Tasks – Part 2
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.
Background Tasks – Part 1
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…
VerticalText – Part 2
In the previous article in this series we began looking at how we can creat vertical text on Android. When searching for a solution to this problem I found was another approach that appealed to me because it is just plain sneaky! Also, it uses a vanilla TextView control and doesn’t break any of its…
VerticalText – Part 1
Recently I was working on a project where I had free reign over the UI, and felt that it would be very nice to have some vertically oriented text. On searching through the Android API docs, I found that rotating Views isn’t supported directly, but a quick Google search found a number of approaches. In…
Compound Drawables
I recently learned about a small feature in Android which has been there since API level 1 (the variant that we’ll use has been in there since API 3, but others appeared in API 1): Compound Drawables. In this article we’ll have a look at what they are and see how we can use them…
Data Backup – Part 2
In the first article in this series we had a first look at Android Data Backup. We got a simple app working which successfully stored its SharedPreferences in the cloud and restored them we the app was re-installed. Thee was one problem, however: If we manually triggered a restore of the SharedPreferences, we did not…
Data Backup – Part 1
Normally on Styling Android I try and stick to UI / UX tips and techniques, but in this series of articles I’m going to cover a topic that is not directly UI / UX specific yet, if implemented, can delight your users: using Android Data Backup to backup and restore app settings / config to…