Question

I have a piece of code in Java which draws 2 icons to the screen. I want to enforce a delay between them, and am unsure of the best way.

At the moment I have;

cell.setIcon(image1);
Thread.sleep(500); // Ignored try() for brevity
cell2.setIcon(image2);

But this seems to cause the delay before either are drawn. Why is this, and how can I fix it?

Answer 1

Assuming you’re using Swing, you need to cause the sleep to be performed on a worker thread, like so:

new SwingWorker<Void,Void>() {
    @Override
    protected Void doInBackground() throws Exception {
        Thread.sleep(500);
        return null;
    }
    @Override
    protected void done() {
        cell2.setIcon(image2);
    }
}.execute();