Google Android ArrayAdapter vs SimpleCursorAdapter

I've been trying to create a "mover" interface in Android. I use the term "mover" to describe a interface displaying two lists where you can move items from one list to the other. This can be done with arrow buttons if you have enough screen real estate, but I don't think that will work on the small screen of a cell phone.

In any case, my first attempt contained two ListViews, one with an ArrayAdapter of Strings, the other with a SimpleCursorAdapter. For reasons which I haven't yet figured out, the items in one list were a different font size than in the other list. The SimpleCursorAdapter font size was smaller than the ArrayAdapter. I tried a number of changes in the layout file (e.g., changing weights and such), but none of them worked.

I ended up reworking my data storage so that I could use SimpleCursorAdapters for both ListViews, and the font sizes matched. I'm guessing that the Adapters (which I consider the "Controller" in the model-view-controller paradigm) are making some decisions "behind the scenes".

Onward to the next Android mystery...

The More Things Change...

I went to the StackOverflow DevDay in San Francisco on Monday. Lots of information, most of it useful. Mark Harrison's presentation where he "deconstructed" a Peter Norvig Python script gave me a few new pointers about Python. It also got me to thinking about list comprehensions, specifically the "why"? Performance? Possibilities for parallelization?

This morning's Google search was, therefore:

Python "List Comprehension" advantages

which turned up this:

http://techorama.comyr.com/tag/list-comprehension/

He mentions performance (as well as parallelization):

Simple for loops implemented in python are handled by the interpreter, and are slow. List comprehensions and map() have a in-built, fast, internal C implementation which does away with the overhead of the for loop.

Good to know about, but mildly ironic in that it leads back to C code for performance. The 70's meet the 00's.