Blinker View for Android

A variant of Android View that blinks only the source image (not the background)

Description

As stated before, this is a variant of Android View that blinks only the source image (not the background). One important thing to note here is that (contrary to many approaches you can find on the web) it only blinks the given "source" drawable. The whole View is always at 100% alpha (i.e. always fully visible, including the View's background drawable), but its "source" drawable alternates between 0% and 100% alpha.

Programming language: Java

License: GNU General Public License v3.0 only

Tags: UI     Android     Animations     UI Widget     App     Java     Layout     Transitions     Views     Custom View     Android-library     Blink     Alpha     Blinker    

Latest version: v1.0.1

README

Blinker View for Android

What is this?

Blinker View is an Android View that blinks a given drawable. Yes, it's that simple. Place it in your layout and you can now blink the drawable it holds.

One important thing to note here is that - contrary to many approaches you can find on the web - it only blinks the given "source" drawable. The whole View is always at 100% alpha (i.e. always fully visible), including the View's background drawable. To blink the whole View, you don't need the custom-view approach, you can create an Alpha animation and go with that.

Examples

To use the BlinkerView in an XML layout, you would add something like this:

    <me.angrybyte.blinkerview.BlinkerView
        android:id="@+id/blinkerView"
        android:layout_width="@dimen/tap_dimension"
        android:layout_height="@dimen/tap_dimension"
        android:background="@android:color/darker_gray"
        android:padding="@dimen/icon_padding"
        app:blink_drawable="@drawable/ic_red_circle"
        app:blink_scale_type="constrain" />

All attributes that are currently available are:

1. blink_drawable - Drawable reference, the one that will be blinking (default is null)
2. blink_interval - Time value in milliseconds, telling the View how long to animate between visible and invisible states (default is 500)
3. blink_autostart - Whether to automatically start the blinking when View is first inflated (default is false)
4. blink_use_fading - Whether to display a fading animation while blinking (default is true)
5. blink_scale_type - How to scale the drawable inside the Blinker View (default is stretch). Options are:
   • stretch - This should be self-explanatory, stretches the drawable to the view's bounds
   • constrain - Snaps the drawable's size to the view's smaller dimension (width or height), keeping the original drawable's aspect ratio
   • center - Centers the drawable inside the view, keeping original drawable size

Note that most of these attributes are also available on the view class via getters/setters.
If you want other attributes available on the view class too, please submit a request through the issues tab.

Setup

Both jCenter and mavenCentral are supported for this dependency.
To include the BlinkerView in your app, add the following line to your app's build.gradle dependecies block.

    // look for the latest version on top of this file and replace the placeholder with it
    implementation "me.angrybyte.blinkerview:blinkerview:LATEST_VERSION" 

If you're using the View in a library module and would like the dependency to go through to your main project as well, then you should use api instead of implementation in the dependency declaration.
For older Gradle versions, these keywords are not supported, so you should use the compile keyword.

Contributions

All interested parties need to create a new Feature request so that everyone involved in active development can discuss the feature or the workaround described. Any pull request not referencing a Feature request will be automatically denied.
Furthermore, we are trying to test everything that's not trivial and keep the code as clean as humanly possible; thus, any pull requests that fail the CI code quality check or fail to properly pass the tests will also be automatically denied. If pull requests pass every check (and don't worry, it's really not impossible to pass those), one of the maintainers could then merge the changes to the release branch - this triggers a CI build with device/emulator tests; and, if all goes ok, the library is automatically deployed to jCenter and MavenCentral.

Further support

In case of emergency errors, please create an issue. Want to add something? Sure, just fork this project and submit a pull request through GitHub. Keep in mind that you need a Feature request first with a finalized discussion (see the Contributions section). Some more help could potentially be found here:

• StackOverflow, here
• On my blog