StartFlipping

After getting our widget from the layout, we first set up the “in” and “out” animations. In Android terms, an animation is a description of how a widget leaves (”out”) or enters (”in”) the viewable area. Animations are a complex beast, eventually worthy of their own chapter but not covered in this text. For now, realize that animations are resources, stored in in your project. For this example, we are using a pair of animations supplied by the SDK samples, available under the Apache 2.0 License. As their names suggest, widgets are “pushed” to the left, either to enter or leave the viewable area.

After iterating over the funky words, turning each into a , and adding the as a child of the , we set up the flipper to automatically flip between children () and to start flipping ().

The result is an endless series of buttons, each appearing, then sliding out to the left after 2 seconds, being replaced by the next button in sequence, wrapping around to the first after the last has been shown (see Figure 10‑11).

Figure 10‑11. The Flipper2 application, showing an animated transition

The auto‑flipping is useful for status panels or other situations where you have a lot of information to display, but not much room. The key is that, since it automatically flips between views, expecting users to interact with individual views is dicey – the view might switch away part‑way through their interaction.