Mark - I've spent a lot of time developing for a lot of mobile platforms. It's true that they all have their quirks, and they all need a bit of tweakiness, but this stack business seems to me to be more than ordinarily tweaky.
The Android layout scheme has been a strange thing to work with. It's powerful, but it is complicated, and it's not been easy to get the results we need from it. It is definitely one of the awkward bits of Android development. Now it's more awkward. Reworking existing layouts, using more laborious techniques when making new ones, building a UI to economise on views instead of to serve the user, having to measure the deepest possible nesting in an environment where views can be built at runtime - none of this is helpful. I expect we are stuck with the teeny stack for 1.5. I'm sure the Android engineers haven't gone this way for trivial reasons, and I'm sure they won't change it just because I have a moan about it. But, I'd like to be clear that this is not just an 'excuse for a bit of optimisation' - it's a real (even if unavoidable) step backwards. R. On Apr 24, 7:00 pm, Mark Murphy <mmur...@commonsware.com> wrote: > jarkman wrote: > > Scratching about looking for ways to use less stack, > > and to avoid complicated view structures, doesn't feel very 2009. > > Well, bear in mind, you are far closer to doing embedded systems > development than desktop or server development when you write for mobile > devices. These sorts of hiccups and optimizations are par for the course > when working on embedded systems, as I understand it. > > My hope is that we can collectively work out a set of design guidelines > to help avoid stack issues, while we await more stack space, or more > efficient use of existing stack space, or something. > > Cases in point: Romain Guy wrote a couple of blog posts earlier this > year about using RelativeLayout instead of nested LinearLayouts and > using <merge> to eliminate redundant layouts needed solely to satisfy > XML requirements. I link to them in a blog post I wrote up on this topic > earlier today: > > http://androidguys.com/?p=4688 > > At the time he wrote those posts, my reaction was "meh", because I > didn't see the value. Now, of course, the value is much more obvious and > immediate. > > -- > Mark Murphy (a Commons > Guy)http://commonsware.com|http://twitter.com/commonsguy > > Android App Developer Books:http://commonsware.com/books.html --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Android Developers" group. To post to this group, send email to android-developers@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to android-developers-unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/android-developers?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
