How to use an asset in Android Ui? - android

I am new to Android Studio. While working on front end its sometimes easy to take some parts as png file and place it on the particular position instead of recreating it in xml file. I am confused can we use png all the time ? I am worried about memory space . Like the app contains 50 pages and in each page I use 1-2 assets . I don't want my app to have more than 40mb. What will be the best way to do? Can we store the image as a URL and retrieve it whenever we use. What's the drawback in that way?

So many questions :)
I am confused can we use png all the time ?
Use what's best for your picture. For a photo, a JPEG will probably do better. But if you wish, you can use PNG all the time, yes.
I don't want my app to have more than 40mb.
Check and see. Depends on how big your images are; we can't tell.
What will be the best way to do?
Not enough information to tell you that. In general, there's nothing wrong with using images in assets.
Can we store the image as a URL and retrieve it whenever we use.
Yes.
What's the drawback in that way?
You'll need to get some server space somewhere. Also, there will be a loading latency. Also, your app won't be usable while disconnected from the Internet.
While working on front end its sometimes easy to take some parts as png file and place it on the particular position instead of recreating it in xml file.
That's the part that is confusing to me. Android XML layouts usually contain interactive elements, ones that the user can interact with. Images, on the other hand, tend to be static. What kind of XML is there out there that you think you can replace by an image?

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Imageview down the performance of my app

I am working on an Android app where, once a user clicks a login button, the app launches an AsyncTask to verify account details with a remote server. That part works fine by itself and doesn't make my app slow. However, when you click the login button, it launches a second activity where I have 4 ImageViews. When I added that part of the app, it became significantly slower (from less than a second to about 5 seconds loading time). I load the images into the ImageView from the XML layout file directly, so I'm not sure what I'm doing wrong.
My question is that do ImageViews make your app slow, and if so, how do you optimize their performance?
I was working my own app when I actually experienced this too. The reason is because if the files are to big they take a while to load into memory and set as the Image View. There is two ways you could really sort it out.
1: Get a smaller version of the picture. Smaller pictures come up faster and aren't prone to an OutOfMemory exception which kills the app :(.
2: A better way is to use the Picasso api. I used this APIs to add images in list views, expandable list view with pictures in them. The app was fast and fluid :)
Picasso's api would be your best bet ant it is easy to implement.
Edit:
Here is the link to the site to get the APIs :)
Picasso
The only way I could figure this out is to create an image in photoshop that has all the buttons laid out where you want them on top of the image. Interpret it into your app and put regular buttons over top of the imagebutton pictures that you placed onto your background image. Set the size accordingly to your images of your buttons and then set the background of each button to #null so they aren't seen. Now trying to figure out how to interpret this into orientation view even though I don't think I'll be using orientationview. OH AND CHANGED THE EXTENSION TO A GIF TO SAVE ON DATA RATHER THEN PNG.
Hope this helps I'm sort of new at coding on android as I have lots of experience with HTML .
Cheers
THANKS FOR THE DOWN LIKE I WAS SORT OF NEW AT THE TIME OF NOT KNOW OTHER WAYS TO SET THIS... THANKS THOUGH, MORONS

Best Way to Animate images frame by frame in Android

I have 3 sets of 50 images and I have to create the animations for each set of images in Android application. I am able to create a simple application which animate first set of 50 images using the below method,
Added Animation-list xml in drawable folder and called it using frameAnimation.start().
This method didn't work until I kept the following "android:largeHeap="true" in manifest file.
I am not sure whether this is the good way to animate the images (if we have more number of images and each image of more size like 60 KB. Image is JPG format) or not
I browsed and I found that, if we are able to clear the memory and if we are able to maintain less number of images in memory, then our application will work very fine. So I want to know how to clear the memory?
Please let me know do I need to follow different method to animate the images other than I explained above, so that I can clear the memory.
Thanks for your help.
After looking into several posts and doing much research, I finally ended up modifying the images in Imageview programmatically to simulate frame animation. That way I am just maintaining three images in cache at any point of time (previous, current and next one). I hope that this will be useful to others.
It is not a good thing to process a large amount of images in a frame like manner in Android itself as it will trigger the dreaded "Out of Memory" exception.
Clearing the memory itself is not possible. The best fix for this is proper bitmap handling of the app.
I'm not sure but you might want to check on PhoneGap.
Its an HTML5 Engine that we used before to create a game.
By drawing into the canvas itself, we've recreated frame animation with it. It just requires WebDev skills though.

saving the images with in application - android

i am developing an application where i need to capture the pictures from camera and save them with in application like in this location "/data/data/com...../images" - what i want to know is this the right approach . if not please suggest but my images should not be available to other app's.
Thanks and Regards,
puneeth
I think every approach have their drawbacks. If the picture should always be there (unless delete through app), I feel it may not be best approach. Otherwise it is Ok to use this approach (which is what I am doing too). Only caution I took was, if picture was deleted by someone, always have a default picture to display there (which saves application crash and other alignment issues).
You’re talking about the Context.getFilesDir() directory. Note that, on older phones with separate SD card storage, this area is likely to be quite limited in size, so be careful about saving lots of images here. You may want to use getExternalCacheDir() or getExternalFilesDir() instead.

How to handle large images in android

i'm writing a simple application. i need to handle around 100 images having size dimension 1000*740. images are fixed no need to change. user will see this images like gallery view.
Problem
1.Large number of Images increases .apk filesize .It crosses memory limit(Given by Android market).
2.I placed these images in Drawable folder.Is there any other way to keep this images?
Any Idea?
YOu can host them on a separate site, but you do not have to download them every time. You can download them to an external directory (sd card) and just check if you've got everything you want when starting the app: If you do, you obviously don't have to re-download the shots again.
Is there a reason your images are of that size? If you compress them a bit you should be able to fit a photo in less then half an MB, and I think that the limit is 50mb on the market: You might be able to just squeeze it in.
Upload all the images to a link. Do parsing by using that link.
That's a pretty tough dilemma. Perhaps the user can download the images instead. You could use flickr to host the images.
I would suggest hosting them somewhere and download as "citizen conn" suggested.
Another possibility would be to separate in different sets and have different apk with those (maybe some of them would only have a content provider with some of those pictures). But that's kind of ugly...
Other than that, I don't think there is any way to get around the limit from Android market...

Design recommendation for an android app

I am planning to develop an android app. This will be my first app if I upload it.
I have pretty good idea , what my app should do , But I lack design skills and have no one to ask around. So asking android experts here.
App objective : very simple , have a listview with proper titles , on clicking it(list items) , it will show an appropriate image.
Approaches which I thought.
Have a relation between title(or a tag) and image names and have all images in drawable folder. whenever list item is clicked, point to appropriate drawable and show it.
Pros: easy to do it.
Cons: Seems like not scalable.
Store id,title,drawable reference( drawable ids ) in database and use it.
Pros: (different approach than prev one)
Cons: Creating database is painful if number of items are more !
I want some guidance in this approach, how people create huge database(for android) which
works offline.
Have a server, database there , provide an API for my app , whenever update is pressed ,
local database is synced !
Pros: Seems like scalable approach.
Cons: Hell lot of work for a simple app !
Should one consider storing images in database as BLOB data ?
Or none of these approach is correct.
Any advice will be helpful.
How many images are we talking about? Is this set of images static? If so, I'd go with the first option. Especially if these images are small in size.
If you have to modify the set of images (add/remove images from it somehow), and/or the images are huge I'd use the SD card solution too.
I would go with first option with storing the images on the SD card in a folder.

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