Avoiding memory leaks

Android applications are, at least on the T-Mobile G1, limited to 16 MB of heap. It's both a lot of memory for a phone and yet very little for what some developers want to achieve. Even if you do not plan on using all of this memory, you should use as little as possible to let other applications run without getting them killed. The more applications Android can keep in memory, the faster it will be for the user to switch between his apps. As part...

Why is my list black? An Android optimization

ListView is one of Android's most widely used widgets. It is rather easy to use, very flexible and incredibly powerful. ListView can also be difficult to understand at times.One of the most common issues with ListView happens when you try to use a custom background. By default, like many Android widgets, ListView has a transparent background which means yo can see through the default window's background,...

Can I use this Intent?

Android offers a very powerful and yet easy to use tool called intents. An intent can be use to turn applications into high-level libraries and make code re-use something even better than before. The Android Home screen and AnyCut use intents extensively to create shortcuts for instance. While it is nice to be able to make use of a loosely coupled API, there is no guarantee that the intent you send will be received by another application. This happens...