Hey guy, I was wondering if some of the experts out there could help me with an extended resource strategy? I'm interested to hear about some of the accepted best practices that everyone is using to tackle some of the issues that arise when you've got a ton of graphics/resources.
I just recently upgraded all the resources in my application to have separate hdpi and mdpi graphics. After struggling with and figuring out the dpi-based methodology that android employs I have to say that I'm very impressed with the design. The application looks absolutely fantastic and renders great on a number of devices. Really not that much additional coding once you get it all figured out. The problem I have now is that my application is over 4mb. The application is heavily PNG driven and, even after punypng* optimizing everything, it is still a huge amount of graphics. There are over 150 different icons and headers used in the application. When you add another set for high resolution, you're looking at over 300 images that drive the user experience. Currently, everything is thrown in the /res folder and managed from there through a lookup dictionary. Functionally it works 100%, but I'm worried about the massive amount of transfer time when people upgrade. Has anyone tried breaking out the images and then downloading those separately from the main application? What I'd like to do is publish the APK to the market and have it managed as usual. Then, depending on the device, I'd like to go to an S3 store and download a ZIP of the graphics. Once the download was complete (1.3mb for hdpi, 500k for mdpi) I would like to move the graphics to the storage card and unzip them there, referencing them from the main application on the card. Is this a good strategy? Am I missing anything regarding the auto- scaling and such? Other than the various synchronization issues does anyone see any problems with this approach? Would there be a noticeable performance hit loading the graphics from the SD Card as opposed to memory? Does Android include native zip/unzip libraries? Thanks for all your help and input! Evan Ruff *best optimization tool on the web: http://www.gracepointafterfive.com/punypng/ -- 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
