How to make ListView super fast

This might be the most asked question. How a listview can be made faster/smoother is really all about optimizations of the code.

How to get width/height of a View

As the idea of the Android evolved, Android has received wide attention and deployed on a very wide range of devices. Android UI had to move and make developers' life easier: AbsoluteLayout got deprecated. It is very logical because your app will be installed on very small devices and very large devices and all the devices in between.

Now, it is all WRAP_CONTENT, FILL_PARENT/MATCH_PARENT. Yet, a developer sometimes needs to know the dimensions of his view to do some extra tweaks to perfect his ui.

So, what is the best way to do so?

UI Trick: Sliding content

Here is a small trick that I use sometimes to show a related content in an activity. In the back of my mind, my intention might be to mimic the iphone's presentModalViewController. This would specifically be useful when you have a list of items which users might repeatedly click items to view an Expanded view of them. I prefer to use this instead of a new Activity.