Android: Image loading libraries Picasso vs Glide

This post is about image loading libraries, which could help us in avoiding complex codes.

Downloading of images, caching and reusing of images are know part of all the application and it became part of developers life. While doing this process, We need to consider few things...

• Loading process should be asynchronously.
• Image should display when it is loaded successfully, In case if it is not downloaded then placing some place holders.
• Caching Image rather than downloading every time.

There are more libraries in the market which helps us in avoiding to do all these exercises and here I am going to discuss about Picasso and Glide. Where this two libraries looks similar in the way of implementation and Its easy to integrate in the middle of the application, since its a just a one line code to load image.

There are lot of features in the two libraries and few are listed below, where I can compare them easily.

Glide, an Android media loading library...

Recently I have came across new image loader library Glide from iosched Git Code

Glide

Glide is a fast and efficient open source media management framework for Android that wraps media decoding, memory and disk caching, and resource pooling into a simple and easy to use interface.

Glide's primary focus is on making scrolling any kind of a list of images as smooth and fast as possible, but Glide is also effective for almost any case where you need to fetch, resize, and display a remote image.

Implementation / Usage

When we see the implementation of Glide. It looks similar to the Picasso.

Let Looks the implementation of Picasso and Glide.

Picasso.with(this).load("http://i.imgur.com/DvpvklR.png").into(imageView);

Glide.with(this).load("http://i.imgur.com/DvpvklR.png").into(imageView);

Using the Picasso or Glide are easy and straight forward.

Advantage of Glide here is... Inbuilt it supports caching...

Let us assume, I am having two ImageView where one is loaded with Picasso and othere with Glide as shown below.

Android Supporting tools for Developers / Designers

This post is going to give some useful tools which android developers could be found easy during application development. I have listed down few useful tools below.

Tools Used for Designers / Developers

Android Button Maker

Android Button Maker is online tool to generate buttons code for Android Apps. Android API provide Drawable Resources where XML file defines geometric shape, including colors, border and gradients.
These button is generating based on shape drawable XML code which load faster compare to normal png buttons. You can customize button properties in setting panel and get source code.

Android Pixel Calculator

Android uses Density Independent Pixel (dpi) values to scales the actual screen size. To get device pixel density use getResources().getDisplayMetrics().density;

Open Source Utilities to Optimize PNG Images

There are free tools such as OptiPNG or PNGCrush or TinyPNG for optimizing PNG image files. These tools are open-source and use command line utilities for optimizing PNG images. They can compress the image by using various combinations of algorithms, such as changing the bit depth, replacing unwanted chucks of data with text, delta filters, and so forth to provide the smallest compressed output.

If your app is highly depend on art/creative then you should think over optimizing and shrinking art/creative to decrease file size, it would help you to decrease APK size.

Android Asset Studio

A web-based set of tools for generating graphics and other assets that would eventually be in an Android application's res/ directory.

Currently available asset generators area available for:

• Launcher icons
• Action bar and tab icons
• Notification icons
• Navigation drawer indicator
• Generic icons

OTHER GENERATORS — MISCELLANEOUS ASSET CREATION TOOLS

• Simple nine-patch generator
• Official Android Device Art Generator

COMMUNITY TOOLS — SIMILAR TOOLS FROM THE OPEN SOURCE COMMUNITY

• Android Action Bar Style Generator by Jeff Gilfelt
• Android Holo Colors Generator by Jérôme Van Der Linden

Tools Used for Developers

Remove Unused Resources

During development you typically add a lot of resources such as files, layouts, or drawables. As you go back and made changes and improvements, some of these resources are no longer used, and get left in your code. To detect such unused resources and remove them from your APK file, use the android-unused-resources tool. It scans your project and identifies unused resources. Removing them minimizes the build time and reduces the APK file size.

Android Layout Finder

The Android Layout Finder helps you create the code that ties your Android UI and Java code together.

It's real easy! Just paste your Android XML layout code in the first text field, pick the views that you need, and your code is automatically generated for you.

No more typing out all those nearly identical findViewById() and findFragmentById() calls in your activities or fragments whenever you change your Android layouts.

This tools having special output settings, which helps us in generating code type using RoboGuice, member variable and so on.

Similar to the above layout to Java code generator, we have one android-code-generator-plugin for eclipse which generates code from xml, which Generating Activity Class code based on XML layout.

JSON to POJO

Generate Plain Old Java Objects from JSON or JSON-Schema.

This tools helps in giving annotation style like Jackson 2.x, Jackson 1.x, Gson.

Note: Your input Json Cannot be more than 51200 characters.

There are some other tool for Json to POJO conversion, but it is not like the above one, we can't copy and paste the Json, rather than we should give the json url as input. For more info check Jsongen.byingtondesign

Thanks for reading :) 

Whether this post is helpful?

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Show your Android device on a Computer

With Droid@Screen you can easily show the screen of an Android device on a computer/laptop (PC, Mac, Linux, ...) and then project the desktop using a LCD-projector. Droid@Screen is used for training/teaching and demonstration purposes.

We can  scale the device to fit to your PC size.
We can show multiple devices and view their properties.
We can easily take snapshots and Continuously record screenshots and can save them to directory.


Official Site : http://droid-at-screen.ribomation.com/