Android icon lists

I was hitting some performance / usability issues with a list of icons (sigh, again) ... and looking at the code I came up last time I just don't know what I was thinking. In part it stemmed from initially using an adapter without customising the view; so i was forced to use a standard ImageView.

Anyway, I think ... i finally worked out a relatively clean solution to a listview which contains images which are loaded asynchronously.

In short:

• Create a sub-class of ImageView and use that wherever an icon in a list is used.
• Implement a separate loading/cache which loads images at the direction of this new ImageView via a thread. It needs to be able to throw away requests if they're not needed and generally serialise loading of images.
• Just set the image uri/url/file on the ImageView and let it handle aborting load of an image if it didn't use it.
• And this is the important bit which gets around an annoying problem with android: treat item 0 separately and just load it's icon directly w/o caching.

Without the last item you can end up loading the the image into the wrong imageview so end up with a missing icon - I recall having a lot of problems trying to workaround this last time, but this is a much more reliable and simple solution.

Previously I was trying to use notifyDataSetChanged() each time an image loaded as well as other nasty redirections to try and update properly whilst still coping with android (ab)using item 0 for it's own nefarious purposes (i presume it's for layout).

Originally i needed to load remote url's so I couldn't just use setBitmapURI() (otherwise i probably would've just used that at the time - it was a very short-on-time prototype), and although i currently don't need that functionality this manual code is smoother for the user and I can do other stuff like animations. The android code will delay drawing the screen until the image is actually loaded which adds a lot of judder particulalry if you're images might be large sizes.

Still not as nice as the JavaFX stuff I did, but it'll suffice. I will have to do something similar in the internode radio app - the solution there is different again but not very good either.