Okay, sure if you do something for 5 seconds, once a day, that won't impact the battery much. :)
On Tue, Jun 8, 2010 at 3:01 AM, James W <[email protected]> wrote: > Hi Dianne, I think you misunderstood my 5 seconds comment. > > I was not talking about an widget that updated its view every 5 > seconds, i.e. an update at 0, 5, 10, 15 etc. > > I was postulating a widget that in response to a trigger, say a click > by the user, ran an animation for 5 seconds, by changing the imageview > bitmap every tenth of a second or so. So, say 50 updates in that short > space of time. > > From my position of ignorance that didn't seem it should be more > intensive than doing a similar thing in an activity, and hence > shouldnt drain the battery any quicker than that. > > But I guess the second part of your response still holds, there is > more of a overhead due to the whole remote views thing and the > interprocess communication that requires, which the Activity wouldnt > have. > > Regards > James > > On Jun 6, 3:10 pm, Dianne Hackborn <[email protected]> wrote: > > On Sat, Jun 5, 2010 at 11:09 PM, James W <[email protected]> wrote: > > > Mark, regarding the battery comment, could you or someone elaborate? I > > > have heard this countless times but with no justification. Is there > > > something intrinsically inefficient about updating an appwidget with > > > RemoteViews, more so than some other operation? > > > > > For example, if I am trying to "fake" a 5 second widget animation by > > > frequent updating an imageview over 5 seconds using RemoteViews, does > > > that consume more battery than doing a similar operation on a > > > imageview in an Activity? > > > > > Or is it more the assumption that such animations would be playing > > > permanently, which would not be best practice and I could see of > > > course would drain the battery? > > > > Both. If your widget is updating every 5 seconds... well, you are > running > > your code every 5 seconds the entire time the device is able to run, > which > > is going to kill the battery. It doesn't matter if you were doing this > in > > your own process or elsewhere. > > > > Also RemoteViews is not a negligible. There is nothing intrinsically > > inefficient about it compared to other things... but building a view > > hierarchy and updating it is not close to a 0-cost thing. And there is > the > > additional overhead of the work you do needing to be communicated to the > > system, and then to the home screen, where it needs to execute your UI > > operations (worse case having to re-inflate and build your view > hierarchy). > > > > -- > > Dianne Hackborn > > Android framework engineer > > [email protected] > > > > Note: please don't send private questions to me, as I don't have time to > > provide private support, and so won't reply to such e-mails. All such > > questions should be posted on public forums, where I and others can see > and > > answer them. > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google > Groups "Android Developers" group. > To post to this group, send email to [email protected] > To unsubscribe from this group, send email to > [email protected]<android-developers%[email protected]> > For more options, visit this group at > http://groups.google.com/group/android-developers?hl=en > -- Dianne Hackborn Android framework engineer [email protected] Note: please don't send private questions to me, as I don't have time to provide private support, and so won't reply to such e-mails. All such questions should be posted on public forums, where I and others can see and answer them. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Android Developers" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/android-developers?hl=en

