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public class DrawableManager { private final Map drawableMap; public DrawableManager() { drawableMap = new HashMap(); } public Drawable fetchDrawable(String urlString) { if (drawableMap.containsKey(urlString)) { return drawableMap.get(urlString); } Log.d(this.getClass().getSimpleName(), "image url:" + urlString); try { InputStream is = fetch(urlString); Drawable drawable = Drawable.createFromStream(is, "src"); drawableMap.put(urlString, drawable); Log.d(this.getClass().getSimpleName(), "got a thumbnail drawable: " + drawable.getBounds() + ", " + drawable.getIntrinsicHeight() + "," + drawable.getIntrinsicWidth() + ", " + drawable.getMinimumHeight() + "," + drawable.getMinimumWidth()); return drawable; } catch (MalformedURLException e) { Log.e(this.getClass().getSimpleName(), "fetchDrawable failed", e); return null; } catch (IOException e) { Log.e(this.getClass().getSimpleName(), "fetchDrawable failed", e); return null; } } public void fetchDrawableOnThread(final String urlString, final ImageView imageView) { if (drawableMap.containsKey(urlString)) { imageView.setImageDrawable(drawableMap.get(urlString)); } final Handler handler = new Handler() { @Override public void handleMessage(Message message) { imageView.setImageDrawable((Drawable) message.obj); } }; Thread thread = new Thread() { @Override public void run() { //TODO : set imageView to a "pending" image Drawable drawable = fetchDrawable(urlString); Message message = handler.obtainMessage(1, drawable); handler.sendMessage(message); } }; thread.start(); } private InputStream fetch(String urlString) throws MalformedURLException, IOException { DefaultHttpClient httpClient = new DefaultHttpClient(); HttpGet request = new HttpGet(urlString); HttpResponse response = httpClient.execute(request); return response.getEntity().getContent(); } }

1. you can look at the video from Google IO conference 2009, called Turbo charging your UI's by Romain Guy; he discussed some of the optimizations you can do when working with ListViews. 2. You can read Mark Murphy's series of ListView tutorials at android guys titled Fancy ListViews: http://www.google.co.in/url?sa=t&source=web&ct=res&cd=4&ved=0CBYQFjAD...

I haven't looked in details at the 3 other approaches but I know that a big difference between what I do in Shelves and what I've seen done in other places is how user interaction is handled. Shelves listens to scroll events on the ListView and tries to identify taps vs scrolls vs fling to always give priority to the UI. For instance, when you touch the screen to stop a fling, Shelves starts loading images, but does so only after a very short delay so that if you are touching the screen to fling some more, the fling animation won't stutter because of the extra work load. But that's details.

But in practice, you will notice that the AsyncTask is limited to 10 threads. This number is hardcoded somewhere in the Android SDK so we cannot change this. In this case it’s a limitation we cannot live with, because often more than 10 images are loaded at the same time.

I’ve shown you how to improve performance of a ListView in three different ways: By loading images in a seperate thread By reusing rows in the list By caching views within a row