Book Image

Android High Performance Programming

By : Emil Atanasov, Enrique López Mañas, Diego Grancini
Book Image

Android High Performance Programming

By: Emil Atanasov, Enrique López Mañas, Diego Grancini

Overview of this book

Performant applications are one of the key drivers of success in the mobile world. Users may abandon an app if it runs slowly. Learning how to build applications that balance speed and performance with functionality and UX can be a challenge; however, it's now more important than ever to get that balance right. Android High Performance will start you thinking about how to wring the most from any hardware your app is installed on, so you can increase your reach and engagement. The book begins by providing an introduction to state–of-the-art Android techniques and the importance of performance in an Android application. Then, we will explain the Android SDK tools regularly used to debug and profile Android applications. We will also learn about some advanced topics such as building layouts, multithreading, networking, and security. Battery life is one of the biggest bottlenecks in applications; and this book will show typical examples of code that exhausts battery life, how to prevent this, and how to measure battery consumption from an application in every kind of situation to ensure your apps don’t drain more than they should. This book explains techniques for building optimized and efficient systems that do not drain the battery, cause memory leaks, or slow down with time.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Android High Performance Programming
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Debugging tools


We now know the problems behind the creation of a flexible and efficient UI and how to solve them. But, how can we know if we are doing well? Moreover, how can we measure the output quality of our hard work? Let's go through the various tools you can use to not only measure our product, but also to find other problems, to fix them, and to improve the performance of our application during its whole life cycle.

The Design view

During the development process, the creation of XML layout files is an underestimated activity: if the layout is well-designed in the development step, the application won't need any particular effort to improve performance. While writing XML files, the IDE allows us to watch what we are designing in a preview mode inside the layout editor. This contains the Text and the Design view, as in Figure 15:

Figure 15: The Design view

The Design view contains a special view called Component Tree that shows the view hierarchy while we are making it. In Figure 16,...