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When you switch orientations, Android will create a new View. You're probably getting crashes because your background thread is trying to change the state on the old one. (It may also be having trouble because your background thread isn't on the UI thread) I'd suggest making that mHandler volatile and updating it when the orientation changes.

If your data is stored in a SQLite database on the device, performing a full-text search (using FTS3, rather than a LIKE query) can provide a more robust search across text data and can produce results significantly faster.

If your data is stored online, then the perceived search performance might be inhibited by the user's data connection. You might want to display a spinning progress wheel until your search returns.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?><searchable xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android"    android:label="@string/app_label"    android:hint="@string/search_hint" ></searchable>

Additionally, you can feel free to use the Search bar selection mechanism as a replacement for tabs since it’s really just a fast pivot on a data set. If you have more than 3 data sets, tabs become problematic since no more than 3 can be onscreen at once. For example, look at how we implemented the Profile switching mechanism below:

The good news for developers is you get this highly functional contacts feature for free if users choose to sync contact information into your app

The good news for developers is you get this highly functional contacts feature for free if users choose to sync contact information into your app. QuickContact for Android provides instant access to a contact's information and communication modes.

Android's search framework provides a user interface in which users can perform a search and an interaction layer that communicates with your application, so you don't have to build your own search Activity. Instead, a search dialog appears at the top of the screen at the user's command without interrupting the current Activity.

So the basic idea is: launch an AsyncTask making your service call, show a nifty progress dialog while the task thread is running, and have the task’s result be posted back to your activity once it completes. Cool, but what if the user decides to rotate the screen while your task is running? Or a phone call comes in, interrupting your app, and Android decides to kill it? Both these actions will effectively terminateyour activity, and recreate it when resuming (yes, a screen rotation kills your activity, very clever, isn’t it?). Unfortunately, any AsyncTask that was still running now holds a stale reference to your activity, because the restarted activity will be an entirely different object in memory (and it will go through onCreate(), as if the activity had started for the first time). I’m not entirely sure whether AsyncTask will actually post back the data to the old activity object (if it was a weak reference, it may already have been garbage collected), but in any case, your “new” activity will never see it, because it’s a different instance.