Question

I am trying to get my TextView to update in a separate thread so that it doesn’t slow down my UI. It works, but when I add in a while loop to control it, it hangs the program in a black screen.

Code:

handler.post(new Runnable(){
           @Override
            public void run() {

            while(media[6].isPlaying()) {

            TextView myText = (TextView)findViewById(R.id.timerT);   

            myText.setText(getTimeString(media[1].getCurrentPosition()));        


            handler.postDelayed(this,10);
                                        }
        }

    });

I thought that the runnable creates a new thread, meaning that this wouldn’t happen? Or am I going badly wrong?

Answer 1

Your black screen is because you are running an arbitrary duration while loop on the event dispatch thread: never do this. For something of this sort you want to use AsyncTask or start your Runnable in a separate thread and then use View.post to send the timer updates only.