how to reduce activity launch time - android

I am using Navigation drawer in my application. for this I have support libraries included in my project(support library 7 and 4). everything is fine and working well but I have a problem that is when my main activity launches then it becomes blank for 2 to 3 seconds. my main activity contains code for the navigation drawer. I have placed all the code to onResume(). I have tried different ways to overcome this problem but every time I face same problem. is this the standard time which an activity takes to become visible or it is something unexpected behavior of my app. earlier I tried with actionbarsherlock but Now I removed it. so please suggest me a possible solution to this problem.
I have more description to this problem hereStack overflow question

There can be several reasons behind slow loading of activity
Probably you are using a complex layout file which takes time to render. You could use ViewStub and inflate your layouts only when required
if you are loading some data you could use an asynctask to load the data in background and populate views when data is loaded.
Check if you are loading large images in oncreate or onresume.
also some more reference from Android Guidelines

Related

Android tabbed activity recycler isn't showing and is causing the top bar to scroll

I have been trying to create a tabbed activity for a simple planner application (appropriate files here). I have a RecyclerView inside of a fragment, which is being displayed in a ViewPager that's assigned with the tabs. The issue is, when I use a RecyclerView, the content's don't show and the tabs and action bar scroll up (which can be seen here). I'm using the default and google-supplied code examples, but to no avail. Also, in my fragment with just text, it doesn't seem to center correctly (seen here, is it the size of the fragment?)
Basically, to sum it up, how does one correctly use a RecyclerView in a tabbed activity fragment, and how does one get text to properly center (or get the layout to be the right size) inside of a tabbed activity fragment?
EDIT: The source was hyperlinked (in the "here"s) If you can't find those...
- Gist: https://gist.github.com/Cameronlund4/0e248ea3106d247b52f914affda1885c
- Issue with scrolling: https://imgur.com/a/doi7s
- Issue with centering: https://imgur.com/N767Wg9
More info: I added debug messages to pretty much every method in the adapters, fragments, and activities. All of the GradeFragment's methods are running fine, however the only method being run inside of the ClassAdapter for this is onAttachedToRecyclerView. I'm 99% sure this is the cause of the non-showing up cards (Because the data is never getting put into the cards then), however I have no idea why this would occur.
I have figured out what's going on. In my constructor for the GradeFragment class, I catch an error for a ParseException. Due to my non-android experience, I simply did Exception.printStackTrace() and it never caught my eye as an issue. The thing is, in AndroidStudio, that doesn't show to the default debug window. Learn from my lesson, use log when printing errors.

Activity Return Transitions - Shared Elements - Killed Activity

Library used: appcompat-v7:22.2.1,design:22.2.1
Theme used:
Devices/Android versions reproduced on: Nexus 6
Issue: Return activity quickly redraws/appears then fades in with desired behaviour, only with "Don't keep activities alive".
I am wondering if this is a bug or expected behaviour. I have a very simple setup. Activity A contains a toolbar wrapped in an AppbarLayout and CoorindinatorLayout. The toolbar contains a Cardview and a TextView. Upon click of the TextView, Activity A launches Activity B. I am using shared elements and passing them through as Option's via ActivityCompat.StartActivity(bundle, options);
My shared elements work perfectly, even after device rotation. After reading about how I can PostPoneEnterTransition and combo it up with PreDrawListeners I am able to successfully achieve the desired transition even after rotation. My actual activity contains a Viewpager / TabLayout and 2+ fragments but for simplicity sake, I've stripped it back in the video as well as to see if something else was causing this issue.
While dealing with rotation and postponing of the enter transition back to Activity A, I decided to open developer options and check "Don't keep activities alive". The video depicts the app running with that option enabled. If you look closely, you can see upon return to Activity A, it is completely drawn and hidden very quickly and then the fade in occurs as well as the shared element transition.
I've also excluded the navigation bar and status bar in the animations so that I don't see those flicker (redraw redundantly).
My questions are:
Is this a bug, or am I missing a step in order to prevent this.
Why would the app/transitions behave differently with "Don't keep activities alive" vs a plain old device rotation (destroy/recreate).
I've noticed by playing around with some google apps, this behaviour does not occur, or at least that I could find. Is there a way to concretely check if the activity I am returning too is "completely destroyed" so I can cancel the animation? Or do something different?
I can include specifics and code samples if required but my setup is very simple, and reflects a bunch of boilerplate examples from the Android documentation / Stack-overflow.
Sorry I meant to respond to this earlier. What I ended up doing was recreating the example in a completely fresh project following code samples and tutorials as best I could. First making it work with a single image view, and then of course adding my custom layout which was a floating search bar. Everything worked as expected. I went back and reviewed my actual project source (which was littered with different attempts and commented out code while trying to debug this issue) and cleaned it up. I can't say for sure, but I believe it came down to two possible issues:
"Unless you do something unusual..." - Most likely I "was" doing something unusual by the time I created this issue do to my debugging efforts and lack of full comprehension of the shared elements transition framework and lifecycle.
I think what was happening was the shared element transition was failing do to views not being mapped properly. I was excluding the statusBarBackground inside a transition defined in XML. My statusBarBackground was set to transparent so that I had the nice overlay effect for an expanded drawer layout. I found out that while trying to add the statusbarbackground as a shared element via code, the view was actually null resulting in a crash (NPE). As well as I had set a background color (instead of transparent) to my drawer layout. I can't say for sure, but a combination of these mistakes lead to the strange behaviour.
To conclude, I would say that this issue should be closed and everything is working as intended. It would be nice to get a little more insight on handling a transparent status bar as a shared element.
Is this a bug, or am I missing a step in order to prevent this?
No. Everything is working as intended.
Why would the app/transitions behave differently with "Don't keep activities alive" vs a plain old device rotation (destroy/recreate)?
It doesn't. When everything is setup proper and your timing and mapping of shared elements is correct, "Don't keep activities alive" is a concrete way to test your transitions against configuration changes.
I've noticed by playing around with some google apps, this behaviour does not occur, or at least that I could find. Is there a way to concretely check if the activity I am returning too is "completely destroyed" so I can cancel the animation? Or do something different?
This is because the Google dev's did it right :)
For anyone struggling with shared elements, here is a bit of advice.
Start small. Use a single view first and confirm you are getting the correct behaviour in all circumstances, even after rotation and config changes, then you can add complexity.
Use SharedElementCallback to debug your transitions. You can check which views are mapped, which view failed etc.

Refactoring from Fragments to Activities

This is a bit of a desperation call for some good advice.
I began doing a project which involves Navigation drawer as the main menu for the application. After looking at the Android tutorial I followed the example and start developing on top of that. That example is a single activity that replaces the fragments depending on the selected option in the drawer. In part, I followed this design because if I launched Activities the drawer was lost and the Activity would appear with the launching transition and didn't look nice at all.
Now, my project is not a small one. During development I faced several issues like:
onResume not being called on the Fragments (due to not being attached to several activities but one instead.
All the data between Fragments should pass through the single Activity
Managing the Options Menus in the ActionBar became a real pain.
And many others I don't recall now
Now I am facing a new issue. In one of the fragments I need to have a Spinner that will switch fragments inside this one. And of course, the fragment will need to change the navigation mode in the action bar. This was a major headache to develop, but now I am facing a bigger problem with some fragments inside losing the activity context (like if they were detached).
After so many problems I just decided to switch back the whole app to Activities (this is a custom app that will run in just 1 tablet model, so no worries about fragmentation). So, in short I am looking for advice on the less painful way to do this.
I am on a extremely tight deadline that lead me to start implementing without designing (like a complete noob). Now I am being hit with so many issues that, if I didn't need the money, I would cancel this project at once.
Please help!
I can give a little advice, but sadly your situation can't really be solved by any one answer here.
First off, switching from a Fragment design to an Activity design is a lot easier than switching the opposite way. You can actually use all of the fragments you had before, and just have each activity loading only 1 of the fragments (or multiple if you prefer).
Also, when handling Intents (starting new activity), after the startActivity() call you can call overridePendingTransition() to make the launching transition whatever you want (or remove it completely).

Android: Multiple views, deep navigation, one Activity. What is the best way to handle?

I'm looking for the the best way to reproduce, in an Android app, the behavior of the iPhone UiNavigationController within an UITabBarController.
I'm working on this Android app where I have a TabActivity and 4 tabs. I've already gone through a lot of posts regarding the use of activities and tabs and how it's not a good idea to use activities for everything, which seems fair enough. I decided to use one Activity on each tab anyway, since it makes sense in my application.
However, in one of those activities I have a deep navigation tree with more than one branch and up to 12 different views the user can go through.
The problem is: Android controls the navigation through activities inside an app, if you click the back button it will go to the previous one, but if I'm navigating through views, using one Activity, and I click back, it just finishes it. So how can I have a smooth navigation behavior between views in an Activity?
I had implemented this using a TabActivity with FragmentActivity as each tab. Utilizing Fragments API you can organize the code just like you would be using 12 different activities, still using only 1 for each tab in fact. Fragment's framework will handle back key press for you to show previous fragment instead of closing the entire activity.
There are some problems with such approach, for example, there's no MapFragment, but the workarounds can be found here on SOF.
You will need Android Support Package if your minimum SDK version is lower than 3.0.
Well I know very little about UiNavigationViewController, but I guess you want something to navigate between different Views. As you are using TabActivity, every tab should load into a separate Activity.
But since you want to branch it out, using that many Activities is not a perfect solution, neither the ActivityGroup too. The better solution, as per my opinion(I have run into similar problem once) is to have the main or root tabs loads into separate Activity, but for their branches, use the ViewFlipper, which flips the Views. So the whole Layout(Subclass of View) can be flipped.
You may run into some problem while flipping more than two Views (as what people say, though I never had any problem). So in that case you can use layout.setVisibility(View.GONE) to hide the layout and just change it with View.VISIBLE for next view.
And about the concerns of back button, you need to store the last used View or Activity into a variable, and in the override of onBackPressed(), just need to call them.
There might be better solution than this, not that I can remember, but yeah it's the easiest solution I can come up with.

Opening an activity within a View in Android

I've recently started developing Android Apps, and whilst the model is making more sense the more I look at it, I cannot do something (nor find any reference material on it) which to me seems quite simple.
I have an activity which has five buttons along the bottom, and a blank View taking up the rest of the screen. I want, upon clicking these buttons, for an activity to be opened in (and confined to) this view. I can get a new activity running without incident, but this opens in a new screen.
If anyone can show me an easy way to launch a (sub/child?) activity within a view which is defined in the parent activity's layout xml file - equally, it could be created in the parent activity - you'd really be doing me a favor!
I'd recommend taking a look at TabHost. The tabhost is an Activity itself, and the sub-views are all Actvities as well.
Here is a good tutorial that'll get you going very quickly. There is a more work to create (optional) icons for the tabs (also describe in the tutorial).
Hope this helps.
Edit* You mentioned buttons being at the bottom of the screen. Take a look at this SO Question
You can achieve that by using an ActivityGroup... here is a simple example which shows how to do it using a TabActivity:
http://web.archive.org/web/20100816175634/http://blog.henriklarsentoft.com/2010/07/android-tabactivity-nested-activities/
Of course, you will have to change the code since you are not using TabActivities. Just take a look at the getLocalActivityManager and getDecorView methods that is what you will be using.

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