Archive for category Android

There’s an interesting post at The Radioactive Yak, by Reto Meier, Google Developer Advocate, who takes a good look at an Android app and explains how it might be improved. While the analysis is very interesting and informative, the comments have turned into a discussion of whether apps should have an Exit option.

I personally, don’t think Android apps should have an Exit option. It’s not an Android Idiom. People should just (expect to) use ‘Back’. However, I can see why users might think there should be a way of closing apps. This has been a issue under Windows Mobile for a decade and a half. Microsoft have fiddled with this over the years but there are valid arguments on both sides whether users should be able to close apps. I personally think Android is different in that there’s no shared idiom from the desktop and people should learn to use Android as it was originally intended.

I have been looking into techniques, for a specific client project, to make Android Java code run faster and do some regular data processing in real time. My research took me back to some open source game code I mentioned a while ago. While I am not writing a game, some of the techniques are applicable.

The author of the code is Chris Pruett a Developer Advocate at Google. He presented on the code and writing real-time games for Android at Google I/O last year. There’s a video of the presentation at YouTube.

Here are some tips from his presentation…

• You can get away with using Canvas rather than OpenGL if you have of the order of about 10 sprites.
• Prefer use of Draw Texture extension (but also check it exists on the phone).
• Avoid allocating anything so as to avoid Java garbage collection which can take up to 300ms. This means don’t use collections, enums, arrays.sort in your time sensitive code loop.
• Don’t call interface functions in your time sensitive code loop.
• Sleep momentarily in onTouchEvent to prevent flooding of MotionEvents when the user touches the screen.