Question

I have a view in android in which I need to sequentially highlight and unhighlight buttons when a particular control is pressed. This is a usability feature — as each button is highlighted, it is read aloud to the user. I use the AlphaAnimation class to accomplish the highlighting. However, now matter how many invalidate calls or callback threads I put in, only the last animation is actually presented to the user. The others are still called but overridden by the last animation so only one is shown. I have also tried simply setting the opacity/alpha properties of the buttons, but all of these modifications end up being batched and performed all at once. I need these animations to occur in a sequence. I have not yet found a good way to update the main view before control flow is returned to it (i.e. update it multiple times before the method it calls returns). Does anyone have any ideas?

Answer 1

For everyone else who runs into this problem, I finally found a solution.

The documentation:
http://developer.android.com/reference/android/os/AsyncTask.html
http://www.anddev.org/tut_updating_ui_from_a_thread-t11125.html

My solution: create an AsyncTask that takes in an array of buttons. In its doInBackground method, it highlights/dims and then pushes an update of the effected buttons to the onProgressUpdate method during each iteration in the button highlighting scheme. The onProgressUpdate method calls invalidate() on all the buttons passed in. Then for easy access to the highlighting functionality, I created a static highlight(buttons…) method that creates a new instance of the AsyncTask and calls execute on it.