Question

Maybe it is not the best approach, but my application use onCreate for loading/preparing quite many layouts into ViewAnimator, so after the application start, I have every screen of my app prepared for use. So changing different screens is smooth and fast.

The drawback of this method is, that it takes 5 seconds for the first layout to appear. To be exact – all screens of ViewAnimator are defined in XML layout and I supose they are inflated during onCreate.

My application must have a splashscreen, so my question is, if there is some way to use also these 5 seconds to show some image?

EDIT :

Thanks to your answers I came up with this simple solution:

Activity activity;
public void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) 
{
    super.onCreate(savedInstanceState);
    setContentView(R.layout.main_splash);
    activity = this;
    LinearLayout splash_layout = (LinearLayout) this.findViewById(R.id.splash_layout);

    // after 1 second of splash screen, start initializing everything
    splash_layout.postDelayed(new Runnable() 
    {   
        public void run() 
        {
            activity.setContentView(R.layout.main);

            // Here init whole layout and all class
            // During initialization, the splashscreen is still visible
        }
    }, 1000);
}

Answer 1

I don’t believe any screen will be visible until after the onResume has exited and the main thread begins to service messages. Can you use 2 .xml layouts? One that loads the splash screen immediately on start up then kick off loading the rests of your screens with a layout inflator after the activity has begun?