Book Image

Android Studio Cookbook

By : Mike van Drongelen
Book Image

Android Studio Cookbook

By: Mike van Drongelen

Overview of this book

This book starts with an introduction of Android Studio and why you should use this IDE rather than Eclipse. Moving ahead, it teaches you to build a simple app that requires no backend setup but uses Google Cloud or Parse instead. After that, you will learn how to create an Android app that can send and receive text and images using Google Cloud or Parse as a backend. It explains the concepts of Material design and how to apply them to an Android app. Also, it shows you how to build an app that runs on an Android wear device. Later, it explains how to build an app that takes advantage of the latest Android SDK while still supporting older Android versions. It also demonstrates how the performance of an app can be improved and how memory management tools that come with the Android Studio IDE can help you achieve this. By the end of the book, you will be able to develop high quality apps with a minimum amount of effort using the Android Studio IDE.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Android Studio Cookbook
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Overdraw issues


The interface of your app needs to render quickly, and interaction, such as scrolling through a list, for example, should run smoothly. In particular, older or low-end devices often have a hard time to do these things right. An unresponsive or slow UI can be the result, which is often caused by something that is called overdraw.

Overdraw is the phenomenon of a pixel on a view being drawn more than once. A colored background with a view on top of that has another background color is an example of overdraw (the pixel is drawn twice), but that's not really an issue. Too much overdraw, however, will have an impact on your app's performance.

Getting ready

You will need to have a real device and you need to complete the The Bad app from the previous recipe to demonstrate overdraw issues, but you can examine any other app as well if you like.

How to do it...

Your device contains a couple of interesting developer options. One of them is the Debug GPU overdraw option which can be obtained...