[Android Apps and Games] klinkdawg:
Not sure what could be going on there, i literally changed nothing between the two.

if only. lol i've looked at that and applied things as such since the beginning. I'm going to try and explain things here, hopefully it clears up some questions, might be a long post though :)

The difference between falcon pro and sliding messaging is the fact that falcon only has one long listview to display all of its messages to. This means that you can compile all of the data you need to display at startup and then pass it into one list adapter and presto, you get a fully functioning list that scrolls smoothly and works very well. In sliding messaging, I have to load what could be hundreds of lists depending on the amount of conversations you have. At startup, I load all of the initial data associated with each conversation so that you can view the conversation list easily, along with the first two conversations in the background thread so that they can be displayed as you scroll to the side to the next conversation.

Because of this, I DO NOT load every conversation at start time, early users can attest to the speed that it was excruciatingly slow, so I moved away from this method because it just doesn't work. For this reason, at any given time, sliding messaging will have up to 5 conversations loaded. This includes the current conversation you are viewing, and two conversations to the left and right so that they are ready to go when you scroll to them. This means that as you scroll away from one page and onto the next, it will no longer store one conversation and will begin caching the next in a background process, then displaying the listview once it is done loading that conversation. This is why sometimes when you scroll very quickly, it lags because its still loading the next conversations (happens more often the more messages you have, because these conversations take longer to load with more items). This explains a lot as to why you see slow loading times due to more messages. Traditional messaging apps load in the initial conversation list at startup which tends to happen very quickly since there aren't that many items in it. Even if you have a thousand conversations, this can generally be loaded in less then a second I would say from experience. Then next, when you click on the conversation you want, it loads that conversation and displays it to the screen once its done loading (bigger conversations = more load time again). That's at least how the stock app works as far as i can tell.

Now, perhaps, you can see the roadblock in the very concept of sliding between conversations - it all has to be done on the fly since it just doesn't work to load everything at the beginning, and this means as you scroll, there are constantly background threads loading the data to the screen and after thats done, the UI thread displays that list of messages. After hundreds of ideas that have popped into my head, thats what i've come up with and as far as i can think of, thats how this type of concept has to work. If anyone out there has a better idea and some programming background knowledge who believes they have a better idea, I would love to hear it. my mind is shot out of ideas, especially when everything has come together so smooth and well on my phone. I have no idea what else i can possibly do.

Now onto the issue of lag in the classic layout vs card layout. As far as I can tell, those of you with the worst lag are not on AOSP or an AOSP based custom rom (such as Paranoid Android like I use). I can tell you that my friend who has done some testing for me has a Galaxy Note II, and Sliding Messaging runs like a charm on it when he has paranoid android installed. The second he flashed a touchwiz rom to test on, framerate dropped and all went to hell. This leads me to believe that those types of roms outside of AOSP load resources much more slowly then Google (or custom rom devs, not sure which actually) has achieved with AOSP code. The entire card based layout is based off of precompiled resources (9-patch files mostly for anyone interested) - which is also why the theme engine wont be a possibility for the card layout - and it seems other roms are extremely slow at handling these resources, at least in sliding messaging. Because there is so much going on with the screen at the same time - having to load all of those messages and cards and such - it seems as if the loading of messages isn't whats taking the longest, its loading the card resources. Thats where i've hit the roadblock and don't have any ideas on a fix. All of the code between the cards and classic is exactly the same, the difference is loading from resources vs loading views on the fly.

Hopefully that explains things well for some of you out there wondering why the app cant be buttery smooth... if I knew anything else i could do then i would (although for me, like i've said, its still as smooth as falcon pro, check out the video i posted a few pages back or here). Props to anyone who's actually read the whole way through :) now if only I could write an in depth analysis like this for the english paper i should really be starting on... life would be so much easier then :P