Question

Still messing with my first android application. Basically, I have a fixed header and a fixed footer with menu icons. It’s working kind of well but instead of starting a whole new activity, I only want to update the main content of my application (which I assume would make it 10 times faster). Is that something do-able?

Answer 1

Actually drawing a new layout when switching activities isn’t that hefty on the device resources, assuming you’re not doing some really heavy things with that layout(animation etc.). You probably want to check out how to set the visibility of views:

http://developer.android.com/reference/android/view/View.html#setVisibility%28int%29

So if your main content is inside a container, you simple hide that container when fx. your user clicks a button, and show the other content(which was hidden before) instead.