In Android, if you want to animate an object and make it move an object from location1 to location2, the animation API figures out the intermediate locations (tweening) and then queues onto the main thread the appropriate move operations at the appropriate times using a timer. This works fine except that the main thread is usually used for many other things — painting, opening files, responding to user inputs etc. A queued timer can often be delayed. Well written programs will always try to do as many operations as possible in background (non main) threads however you can’t always avoid using the main thread. Operations that require you to operate on a UI object always have to be done on the main thread. Also, many APIs will funnel operations back to the main thread as a form of thread-safety.
Views are all drawn on the same GUI thread which is also used for all user interaction.
So if you need to update GUI rapidly or if the rendering takes too much time and affects user experience then use SurfaceView.
Example of rotation image:
public class MySurfaceView extends SurfaceView implements SurfaceHolder.Callback {
private DrawThread drawThread;
public MySurfaceView(Context context) {
super(context);
getHolder().addCallback(this);
}
@Override
public void surfaceChanged(SurfaceHolder holder, int format, int width,
int height) {
}
@Override
public void surfaceCreated(SurfaceHolder holder) {
drawThread = new DrawThread(getHolder(), getResources());
drawThread.setRunning(true);
drawThread.start();
}
@Override
public void surfaceDestroyed(SurfaceHolder holder) {
boolean retry = true;
drawThread.setRunning(false);
while (retry) {
try {
drawThread.join();
retry = false;
} catch (InterruptedException e) {
}
}
}
}
class DrawThread extends Thread{
private boolean runFlag = false;
private SurfaceHolder surfaceHolder;
private Bitmap picture;
private Matrix matrix;
private long prevTime;
public DrawThread(SurfaceHolder surfaceHolder, Resources resources){
this.surfaceHolder = surfaceHolder;
picture = BitmapFactory.decodeResource(resources, R.drawable.icon);
matrix = new Matrix();
matrix.postScale(3.0f, 3.0f);
matrix.postTranslate(100.0f, 100.0f);
prevTime = System.currentTimeMillis();
}
public void setRunning(boolean run) {
runFlag = run;
}
@Override
public void run() {
Canvas canvas;
while (runFlag) {
long now = System.currentTimeMillis();
long elapsedTime = now - prevTime;
if (elapsedTime > 30){
prevTime = now;
matrix.preRotate(2.0f, picture.getWidth() / 2, picture.getHeight() / 2);
}
canvas = null;
try {
canvas = surfaceHolder.lockCanvas(null);
synchronized (surfaceHolder) {
canvas.drawColor(Color.BLACK);
canvas.drawBitmap(picture, matrix, null);
}
}
finally {
if (canvas != null) {
surfaceHolder.unlockCanvasAndPost(canvas);
}
}
}
}
}
activity:
public class SurfaceViewActivity extends Activity {
/** Called when the activity is first created. */
@Override
public void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) {
super.onCreate(savedInstanceState);
setContentView(new MySurfaceView(this));
}
}
