Binding the mobile arena

Standard UI elements for iOS and Android do not directly allow data binding. This means that if we want to display a large amount of data, we need to use either ListView (Android) or UITableView (iOS). Depending on what you want to display will depend on whether this actually is a good plan. Consider the following two messages:

The first difference is the size of the speech bubbles. As the amount of text increases, so does the size of the bubble. The messenger doesn't use standard SMS protocols (if it did, Apple would not allow it in the store). So, in theory, we can send as much text as we want as a message.

This causes issues for UITableView. Although we can define UITableCell to be what we want, we still have the problem of resizing the bounds and then wrapping the speech bubble around. There is nothing to say that the third message is as simple as a smiley reply or something closer to a chapter in War and Peace!

Android has a similar issue. It needs to use a patched...