In the thread here I mentioned how you can get simple tween and frame animations working in AppWidgets.
http://groups.google.com/group/android-developers/browse_thread/thread/d1b17d287ea4be2a/243ba27b3db34b58?hl=en&lnk=gst&q=appwidget#243ba27b3db34b58 I realise the usual caveat with AppWidgets applies, they shouldn't be updating that often due to battery issues, but I am using simple animations that are triggered for a short period of time, not animations that are playing permanently. Having said that, those two methods work fine, but have limitations in that both the tween and frame animations have to be prebuilt, and stored in xml at compile time. I am trying to be a bit more dynamic, and want to change the animation at run time, e.g. by loading a different set of bitmaps for my frame animation, based on say the user's choice from an SD card, such as a few frames from an animated gif or short movie clip. My current approach involves pre-loading the required frame bitmaps into a series of invisible ImageViews in my RemoteViews object during the initial OnUpdate. Then in response to a user's click, simulating the animation in a Timer loop by showing and hiding the ImageViews via the RemoteViews.setViewVisibility method. It is fairly simple to show the next one in the list and hide the previous one: e.g. remoteViews.setViewVisibility(MyWidget.IMAGEVIEWS[timercount-1], View.INVISIBLE); remoteViews.setViewVisibility(MyWidget.IMAGEVIEWS[timercount], View.VISIBLE); appWidgetManager.updateAppWidget(thisWidget, remoteViews); This actually works pretty well on my device and the emulator, even with a frame speed of 100milliseconds. However, after a while the garbage collector gets triggered, and causes a noticeable pause in the animation as the GC does its stuff. I am being very careful not to allocate any new objects on my animating timer loops, and I am also calling System.gc() before I start my animation, so I suspect that it is the multiple calls to the appWidgetManager's updateAppWidget() and what is happening inside that which is causing the GC. Is that likely to be internally allocating memory which is eventually scheduled for clean up, or is it more likely my implementation is the problem? Note that I am using the same RemoteViews object for the duration of the animation. The only other way I can think of to do this would be to to set the ImageView bitmaps dynamically within my timer loop, but that seems to cause even more GC glitches on my initial investigations, than the Show/Hide approach. I do realise that this is not what AppWidgets were originally intended for, but it seems to be a common request as they are currently limited in terms of the views that are supported. Regards James -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Android Developers" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/android-developers?hl=en
