In this post I’ll show you how to add animations when trying to switch between screens. Usually when you switch between screens it’s a direct “poof” and the new screen appears in a very un-graceful way. The SDK offers a bunch of easy-to-use animations, and I’ll show you how to use them here.
I tried doing animations on the opening and closing of activities, but I haven’t figured that out yet fully. So instead, I will show you how to use animations when switching on objects/layers inside the same activity. It will still look like you are switching screens, but all the layout data will be in one single XML. If we were to switch between activities, each activity would have had (usually) its own layout XML.
And in the post coming after this one, I’ll show you how to start this animation and switch the screen while dragging your fingers on the touch screen. Let me be a little more precise: while dragging one finger on the touch screen. I’m not sure if the OS handles multi-touch right now – or if that’s something the device has to enable – or both.
Back to the topic: how to switch between layers using animations to make it look like you are changing screens… we will be using a ViewFlipper widget in the layout XML.
