Adding animations to your app interface will give high quality feel to your android applications. Animations can be performed through either XML or android code. In this tutorial i explained how to do animations using XML notations. I will explain how to do the same using android java code in future tutorials. Here i covered basic android animations like fade in, fade out, scale, rotate, slide up, slide down etc.,
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In the source code project provided in this tutorial, I wrote separate activity and XML for each animation. Download and play with the code to get familiar with the animations. Following are list of animations covered in this article.
Basic steps to perform animation
Following are the basic steps to perform an animation on any UI element. Creating animation is very simple, all it needs is creating necessary files and write small pieces of code.
Step 1: Create xml that defines the animation
Create an xml file which defines type of animation to perform. This file should be located under anim folder under res directory (res ⇒ anim ⇒ animation.xml). If you don’t have anim folder in your res directory create one. Following is example of simple fade in animation.
Step 2: Load the animation
Next in your activity create an object of Animation class. And load the xml animation using AnimationUtils by calling loadAnimation function.
Step 3: Set the animation listeners (Optional)
If you want to listen to animation events like start, end and repeat, your activity should implements AnimationListener. This step is optional. If you implement AnimationListener you will have to override following methods.
onAnimationStart – This will be triggered once the animation started
onAnimationEnd – This will be triggered once the animation is over
onAnimationRepeat – This will be triggered if the animation repeats
Step 4: Finally start the animation
You can start animation whenever you want by calling startAnimation on any UI element by passing the type of animation. In this example i am calling fade in animation on TextView.
Complete Code
Following is complete code for FadeInActivity
Important XML animation attributes
When working with animations it is better to have through knowledge about some of the important XML attributes which create major differentiation in animation behavior. Following are the important attributes you must known about.
android:duration – Duration of the animation in which the animation should complete
android:startOffset – It is the waiting time before an animation starts. This property is mainly used to perform multiple animations in a sequential manner
android:interpolator – It is the rate of change in animation
android:fillAfter – This defines whether to apply the animation transformation after the animation completes or not. If it sets to false the element changes to its previous state after the animation. This attribute should be use with <set> node
android:repeatMode – This is useful when you want your animation to be repeat
android:repeatCount – This defines number of repetitions on animation. If you set this value to infinite then animation will repeat infinite times
Some useful animations
Following i am giving xml code to perform lot of useful animations. Try to assign different values to xml attributes to see change in animations.
1. Fade In
2. Fade Out
3. Cross Fading
4. Blink
5. Zoom In
6. Zoom Out
7. Rotate
8. Move
9. Slide Up
10. Slide Down
11. Bounce
12. Sequential Animation
13. Together Animation
Fade In
For fade in animation you can use <alpha> tag which defines alpha value. Fade in animation is nothing but increasing alpha value from 0 to 1.
Fade Out
Fade out is exactly opposite to fade in, where we need to decrease the alpha value from 1 to 0
Cross Fading
Cross fading is performing fade in animation while other element is fading out. For this you don’t have to create separate animation file, you can just use fade_in.xml and fade_out.xml files.
In the following code i loaded fade in and fade out, then performed them on two different UI elements.
Blink
Blink animation is animating fade out or fade in animation in repetitive fashion. For this you will have to set android:repeatMode=”reverse” and android:repeatCount attributes.
Zoom In
For zoom use <scale> tag. Use pivotX=”50%” and pivotY=”50%” to perform zoom from the center of the element. Also you need to use fromXScale, fromYScale attributes which defines scaling of the object. Keep these value lesser than toXScale, toYScale
Zoom Out
Zoom out animation is same as zoom in but toXScale, toYScale values are lesser than fromXScale, fromYScale
Rotate
Rotate animation uses <rotate> tag. For rotate animation required tags are android:fromDegrees and android:toDegrees which defines rotation angles.
Clock wise – use positive toDegrees value
Anti clock wise – use negative toDegrees value
Move
In order to change position of object use <translate> tag. It uses fromXDelta, fromYDelta for X-direction and toXDelta, toYDelta attributes for Y-direction.
Slide Up
Sliding animation uses <scale> tag only. Slide up can be achieved by setting android:fromYScale=”1.0″ and android:toYScale=”0.0″
Slide Down
Slide down is exactly opposite to slide down animation. Just interchange android:fromYScale and android:toYScale values.
Bounce
Bounce is just an animation effect where animation ends in bouncing fashion. For this set android:interpolator value to @android:anim/bounce_interpolator. This bounce can be used with any kind animation. Following slide down example uses bounce effect.
Sequential Animation
If you want to perform multiple animation in a sequential manner you have to use android:startOffset to give start delay time. The easy way to calculate this value is to add the duration and startOffset values of previous animation. Following is a sequential animation where set of move animations performs in sequential manner.
Together Animation
Performing all animation together is just writing all animations one by one without using android:startOffset
I hope you like this tutorial, feel free to ask any kind of questions in the comment section.
Thank You