Android Bitmap Caching

Hey everyone,

This blog post has come about through a conversation between me and Ander Webbs on Twitter, about the usage of Reference and LruCache classes for Bitmap caching in Android. Here I’ll explain how FriendCaster caches it’s Bitmaps, and more importantly manages it’s memory so it doesn’t cause any OOM‘s.
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Tags | bitmap, cache, imageview, recycle

Pull Up to Refresh!

Hi everyone,

I’ve just added a new mode to the Pull-to-Refresh library which allows you to set the View to Pull Up to Refresh (from the bottom) instead of the standard Pull Down from the top.
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Dangers of using WeakReference/SoftReference in Hash-based collections

Hey everyone,

Just a quick post about something I saw this morning. In FriendCaster we use a HashMap collection of SoftReference’d Bitmap’s as an in-memory cache for images. This works fairly well as it means that we can get access to the bitmaps from memory (if they’re still in there). While looking through the source for Reference (super class of WeakReference and SoftReference) I saw that it does not override equals or hashcode.
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New Pull-to-Refresh Library

Hi everyone,

Over the past week or so I’ve been working on a new implementation of the Pull-to-Refresh widget for Android, as part of improvements for FriendCaster. The new library is based off Johan Nilsson’s library, but has changed a lot since then.

The way that the previous library achieves Pull-To-Refresh is via ListView HeaderViews which has certain drawbacks:

• Hard to show/hide the HeaderView when you don’t have enough items in your list
• Have to use ScrollListener, which is slow.
• Only works with ListView’s.