Timer Option in Phimpme Android’s Camera

The Phimpme Android application comes in with all the options like clicking a picture, editing them and sharing it with the world using many many connected social media accounts. Not only this, it features a fully functional camera with lots of different functionality which a user wants in their day to day life. One such feature is the Timer option in Phimpme. In Phimpme, the user can go to the camera settings to enable or disable the Timer options and click their photos after setting the timer for a particular duration. After setting the timer and pressing the capture photo button, it also displays a ticker at the UI of the camera to notify the user the amount of time after which the photo will be clicked.

In this tutorial, I will be explaining how we have achieved this feature in the Phimpme application.

Step 1

The first thing we need to do is to display the options to the user in camera settings to enable/disable the timer and to select the specific amount of time for the delay in the capture. To do this we have made use of the pop-up view in which we have programmatically added all the timer values to be displayed to the user using the code snippet below:

final String[] timer_values = getResources().getStringArray(R.array.preference_timer_values);
  String[] timer_entries = getResources().getStringArray(R.array.preference_timer_entries);
String timer_value = sharedPreferences.getString(PreferenceKeys.getTimerPreferenceKey(), "0");
addArrayOptionsToPopup(Arrays.asList(timer_entries), getResources().getString(R.string.preference_timer), true, timer_index, false)

What the function addArrayOptionsToPopup does is that it adds the following arrays to the linear layout of the pop-up view programmatically.

Step 2

After displaying the timer values to the user, we need to think about the functionality of the camera if the timer is enabled. When the user presses the click picture button we check the condition whether the timer is enabled or not. If it is enabled, we make the application to wait for a specific amount of time before clicking the photo. This can be done using the CountDownTimer class which is provided by Android.

new CountDownTimer(timerDelay, 1000) {
   public void onTick(long millisUntilFinished) {
          //Called after each second
       }
       public void onFinish() {
         //Called after timer delay
       }
   }.start();

What the above piece of code does is to wait for the specific amount of time as specified by the timer delay. Suppose the user selects the option to wait for 5 seconds then we set the timerDelay to be 5000, then the above code calls the onTick method after each second where we update the user that how much time is remaining and on the onFinish method we call the takePicture method to capture the image using the following line of code below.

mCamera.takePicture(null, null, mPicture);

This is how we have implemented the option of Timer in the Phimpme Android application. To get the full source code of the Camera, please check out the Phimpme Android GitHub repository listed in the resources section below.

Resources

  1. Android Developer Guide : CountDown Timer – https://developer.android.com/reference/android/os/CountDownTimer.html
  2. StackOverflow – Implementing Timer in Camera – https://stackoverflow.com/questions/35355320/camera-application-timer-implementaion-issue
  3. GitHub – Phimpme Android Repository – https://github.com/fossasia/phimpme-android/
  4. GitHub – Open Camera Source Code – https://github.com/almalence/OpenCamera

 

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