Question

I have an imageView and want it to work like this:

ImageViewer visible

5 second pause

image view invisible

5 second pause

ImageViewer visible

and so on …

How do I do that? I have tried sleep but it freezes the whole program in 5 seconds. I just want to affect my imageView.

Answer 1

I’m not an Android programmer, but, as a general advice, I’d say you should perform the sleep, better said the waiting, on another thread and execute at the end of the waiting period, on the main thread, a method that toggles the visibility of your imageview.

Getting into more specific detail, I’d say you must use a Handler object because you cannot update most UI objects while in a separate thread. When you send a message to the Handler it will get saved into a queue and get executed by the UI thread as soon as possible:

public class MyActivity extends Activity {

// Handler needed for callbacks to the UI thread
final Handler mHandler = new Handler();

// Create runnable for posting
final Runnable mUpdateUIState = new Runnable() {
    public void run() {
        updateUIState();
    }
};

@Override
protected void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) {
    super.onCreate(savedInstanceState);

    [ . . . ]
}

protected void startToggle() {

    // Fire off a thread to do the waiting
    Thread t = new Thread() {
        public void run() {
            Thread.Sleep(5000);
            mHandler.post(mUpdateUIState);
        }
    };
    t.start();
}

private void updateUiState() {

    // Back in the UI thread -- toggle imageview's visibility
    imageview.setVisibility(1 - imageview.getVisibility());
}
}

or, a snippet of a shorter version,

Handler handler = new Handler(); 
    handler.postDelayed(new Runnable() { 
         public void run() { 
              imageview.setVisibility(1 - imageview.getVisibility());
         } 
    }, 5000); 

using the postDelayed method, that incorporates the delay within the message posting logic.