Draw View before displaying during animation - android

I have two views in a ViewFlipper and have a fast/complex animation between them. The second view contains a list, so at the moment that view become visibile half way through the animation, getView() is called a bunch of times and causes a very noticeable stutter (usually stalling for the entire second half of the animation)
Ideally I would like to pre-render (measure, layout, draw) the second view before starting the animation, but I have not found a simple way to do this.
I have also explored using the drawing cache, off-screen canvases, etc - but I cannot find a simple way to achieve this either. Seems to be a problem anyone animating between two views would have. Any help?

You can do that by specifying a layer type and calling buildLayer() before you start your animation, which forces rendering the view.
newView.setLayerType(View.LAYER_TYPE_HARDWARE, null);
newView.buildLayer();
You could also use LAYER_TYPE_SOFTWARE. The default value is LAYER_TYPE_NONE, which prevents buildLayer() to do anything.

Related

Animated reveal for 14+ Android

I'm tackling the task of an overlaying drawable over a view that animates the drawing of a checkmark as in the following video https://vid.me/MsQj
I don't have a preferred method for doing this but it's just not coming out the way I wanted it to, I tried:
Two views, each with on side of the checkmark to be revealed with an animation, however I'm stuck at the "revealed with an animation" since I can't use the circular reveal on -21
Frame by frame animation, this is the easiest but I'd hate to have 60 images for this stupid animation if it can be done programmatically
Drawing on a custom view canvas
My question would be, is there anything that can make this easier on me, or do I have to tackle it head first and just get on with it
You could create a custom View class which contains two lines defined by ShapeDrawables, one for each leg of the tick. Expose the lengths of these two lines as properties of the class, and then use Property Animation to animate the lengths of the lines.
Property Animation is flexible enough to handle pretty complex timing and sequencing of various properties. In this particular case you would probably want to use an AnimatorSet to sequence the two line animations so the second starts once the first has finished.
I ended up developing a custom View thanks to #SoundConception suggestion and finding out about ObjectAnimator which are very powerful in Android. In essence what goes on is we set a width for the first and second line that make the checkmark and using the animator change the value of those properties from 0 to the desired one.
On the setter for the property, we invalidate the View to redraw it with the new value and with a little tweaking I made a nice View that while its currently only working for my specific layout (ie it needs some more work on the offset calculation) it's able to draw an animated checkmark with some stuff that is customizable.
Precisely, you can set the line width, the color, the length and the animation time. And touching the java file, you can change the interpolator and all the rest of the stuff.
Hopefully the code, while not really commented serves as a basis for someone trying something similar.
For example the following code would generate something like this video, although not really because I was testing opacity and thinner lines, but you get my drift.
<coop.devtopia.CheckmarkView
android:layout_width="250dp"
android:layout_height="250dp"
android:layout_centerInParent="true"
android:id="#+id/view"
app:first_leg_length="50"
app:second_leg_length="100"
app:total_duration="1500"
app:stroke_width="20"
app:stroke_color="#22000000"/>
Repository
Update 4/2/15
I've played with this a little further and added dynamic offset calculation (fancy way of saying centering) to the tick, meaning we can generate big checkmarks, small checkmarks, skinny or thick, reversed or straight and they will be centered in the view. Can't guarantee the same for checkmarks bigger than the container, they will likely be cropped.
Here are a few of the checkmarks generated for this demonstration, of course the animate as if drawn and the effect can be very pleasing and resource friendly. This turn out to be a pretty interesting subject after all.

Animation is too slow

I am working on a game for the Android platform. The layout consist elements which should move without stopping from top to bottom. I decided to use an Handler and I set handler.postDelayed(this, 10).
the animation "step" is 5px (It's actually not px but doesn't matter for the discussion).
The thing is, the animation frequently twitching and isn't smooth. With every call of the handler, I make some simple checks and use setX(), setY() to change the elements position.
What should I do to make the animation smooth? Should I tweak the numbers mention above? Also, I've understood the method setWillNotDraw(boolean b) might be useful - How to use it wisely?
I'd be glad if you could guide me what should I do (Kind of "Do and Don't").
Thank you!
As pskink suggests ViewPropertyAnimator is much friendlier than animating Views yourself. If you want/need to manage it manually, consider View.postOnAnimation instead of Handler.postDelayed to run your update with new animation frames.
Regardless of how you move objects, be wary of how many views you have on the screen. Moving one view can force the entire view hierarchy to redo its layout -- this can definitely kill animation speeds. Try animating a single view in an otherwise empty layout.
Profiling is very helpful for tracking down performance issues.

Performance: How to prevent requestLayout() from laying out entire hierarchy

I have a pretty complex android-application. Already flattened view-hierarchies as far as possible, but I still have lags in the application. For example there is a menu with entries that collapse/expand by having their height set by a ValueAnimator. Typically the animation runs with a bit of a lag the first time, and smooth after this first pass.
I noticed that when i call "requestLayout()" on the Menu-Item, Android seems to do a layout-pass and multiple measure-passes through the entire hierarchy.
Since i know that although the Menu-Item(View) changes height, the Menu(View) itself doesn't, is there some way to tell this to the application?
Can i somehow perform this first pass that seems to lag myself so that it occurs after application start-up and not at the first touch-input?
Here's a sketch of the animation I'm doing:
I am not sure why a layout is being triggered in your animation but I am going to answer your question abstractly.
If you are calling requestLayout (either directly or indirectly) in your animation you are doing it WRONG.
requestLayout, for correctness and safety, does a full view traversal on the view hierarchy b/c conceptually changing bounding box of a node in the view hierarchy can result in change in the bounds of any other node. Not always the case but in general it could, thats why requestLayout is a full traversal.
All of this is just another way of saying requestLayout will eat away time from your 16.6 ms frame time slot and make your animation choppy. This is especially bad for deep and complex hierarchies with many RelativeLayouts which internally does two passes per level (thus potentially causing exponential passes on a subtree)
Now, if you want to animate change in dimension use setScale in a hardware layer. And at the end of the animation merrily call requestlayout and also destroy the layer (to free up memory).
Because its a layer, repeatedly calling setScale in your animation results in change of the texture on the GPU and as a result totally bypass the traversal mechanism of the view hierarchy. This should make it buttery smooth.
Your question looks like mine: Only relayout children and not all the tree
First, you can try to avoid complex view hierarchy for your view. If possible, explode views on views that doesn't depend on another one.
When an animation is performed, avoid any layout request. Start your animation with a delay if a layout request is pending.
Use hardware layers for animation if possible (maybe Android use it by default with ValueAnimator)

Rotated (not animated) views in XML pre-honeycomb?

Is it possible to rotate views in XML with APIs previous to Honeycomb - maybe with the support package? Or is the only way to create a custom class, like described here Vertical (rotated) label in Android
Edit: What I need is a statically rotated view (specifically a TextView, but I guess it's enough to know how to do it with a View). Starting with honeycomb there's a rotation attribute which can be used in XML. I need something like that.
The only thing I have found until now is use an animation with duration 0 but this still moves a bit at start and I don't want that. I tried setting the views invisible and attaching a listener to the animation which makes them visible on animation finished callback, but that made strange results... that changed the position of the views, for some reason.
The best way is with the custom subclass implementation that you linked to, where you can rotate the canvas and resize the view appropriately. This ensures that the view bounds are also set to match the text that is drawn.
The only method of transforming views externally prior to HC is the animation framework, and applying an Animation to the view with a duration of 0 and fillAfter set to true will work, but you may notice flickering on some devices as often the view will render normally on its first frame and then animated to its final position from that point onward. You can work around this by hiding the view and displaying it a bit late...but you can see how hacks are starting to stack up.
In addition, doing an Animation prior to HC will not transform the view bounds themselves, so you won't be able to neatly pack other views around this one because its position from a layout perspective will still be the rectangle calculated for the horizontal (non-rotated) text.
The simple subclass is definitely the preferred method.
HTH
Is it possible to rotate views in XML with APIs previous to Honeycomb
There is RotateAnimation. However, depending on what you are trying to accomplish, that may not meet your needs.

Smooth animation on top of regular Android View

I currently have an app with a regular layout of buttons and widgets. On top of this I'd like to draw some animated sparks and particles and whatnot going on in response to events, so I've got it in a FrameLayout with another View on top to draw the animations. The problem is I can't work out a way of getting smooth movement out of it. I've tried a few options:
SurfaceView: because of the way it takes over the screen, you can't see anything behind a SurfaceView so the background is fully black.
Override View.onDraw and call invalidate(): this almost works, but invalidate isn't a very reliable way of getting a redraw to happen soon, so the motion is very jerky.
Animation framework: Testing with TranslateAnimation, it seems a bit smoother than using onDraw(), but animations are designed to run for a specific duration and I want to draw indefinitely.
Anybody know any tricks to make one of these work properly, or something completely different?

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