Glide

Glide refers to the act of gliding, a form of flight in which an aircraft or animal moves through the air without continuous engine power. In aviation, gliding relies on lift generated by wings to balance weight and produce forward motion, while the vehicle descends along a path determined by air currents and its lift-to-drag ratio. Gliders or sailplanes are designed to maximize lift and minimize drag, enabling long, sustained descents after launch by winch, tow, or air currents. Birds such as albatrosses and falcons, and mammals such as flying squirrels and colugos, also engage in gliding as a mode of locomotion. Gliding is studied within aerodynamics and meteorology, with phenomena such as thermal lift and ridge lift used to gain altitude or extend range. In sport and aviation, gliders are specialized craft that operate without propulsion in steady winds or rising air.

Glide is also the name of an open-source image loading and caching library for Android. Developed for simplifying the process of loading remote images into user interfaces, Glide handles asynchronous requests, memory and disk caching, bitmap pooling, and image decoding. It supports common formats, including animated GIFs and WebP, and integrates with Android views and lifecycle components. Typical usage involves creating a request with Glide.with(context).load(url).into(imageView), allowing developers to specify placeholders, transformations, and error handling. As a library, Glide is designed to reduce boilerplate while managing resources efficiently on mobile devices.