Question

I wrote a rss parser for my podcast app. If I am parsing a rss feed with different podcasts and showing the result in a ListView, it takes about 1-2 seconds for my parser to parse the whole feed.

However, if I want to include a thumbnail of each podcast in my ListView, I need to download the thumbnail first and create a Bitmap with BitmapFactory and then I can store the Bitmap into an ImageView.

Unfortunately this stretches my execution time from 1-2 seconds up to 8-10 seconds.

This is how I grab the thumbnail. Is there a better (and faster) method to achieve what I want to do and if there is one, how can I achieve it?

Thanks in advance.

...
else if (name.equalsIgnoreCase(THUMBNAIL)) {
    HttpGet get = new HttpGet(parser.nextText());
    if (get != null && get.getURI().toString().length()>1) {
        HttpClient client = new DefaultHttpClient();
        HttpResponse response = client.execute(get);
        if (response.getStatusLine().getStatusCode() == HttpStatus.SC_OK) {
            HttpEntity entity = response.getEntity();
            if (entity != null) {
                byte[] bb = EntityUtils.toByteArray(entity);
                currentItem.setBitmap(BitmapFactory.decodeByteArray(bb, 0, bb.length));
            }
     }
}

Answer 1

You should use a separate thread to download the bitmaps. This is called lazy loading. See my tutorial:
http://negativeprobability.blogspot.com/2011/08/lazy-loading-of-images-in-listview.html

or the answers to this question:
Lazy load of images in ListView