gifdrawable

A splash screen is the welcome page of the application. It gives the first impression of the application to the user. So, it is very important to make this page a better-looking one. In Phimpme Android, we had a normal page with a static image which is very common in all applications. So, in order to make it different from the most applications, we created an animation of the logo and added it to the splash screen. As the splash screen is the first page/activity of the Phimpme Android application, most of the initialization functions are called in this activity. These initializations might take a little time giving us the time to display the logo animation. Creating the animation of the Phimpme logo For creating the animation of the Phimpme Android application’s logo, we used Adobe After Effects software. There are many free tools available on the web for creating the animation but due to the sophistic features present in After Effects, we used that software. We created the Phimpme Android application’s logo animation like any other normal video but with a lower frame rate. We used 12 FPS for the animation and it was fine as it was for a logo. Finally, we exported the animation as a transparent PNG formatted image sequence. How to display the animation? In Phimpme Android, we could’ve directly used the sequence of resultant images for displaying the animation. We could’ve done that by using a handler to change the image resource of an imageview. But this approach is very crude. So, we planned to create a GIF with the image sequence first and then display the GIF in the image view. Creating a GIF from the image sequence There are many tools on the web which create a GIF image from the given image sequence but most of the tools don’t support transparent images. This tool which we used to create the transparent GIF image supports both transparent and normal images. The frame rate and loop count can also be adjusted using this free tool. Below is the GIF image created using that tool. Displaying the GIF in Phimpme GIF image can be displayed in Phimpme Android application very easily using the famous Glide image caching and displaying library. But glide library doesn’t fulfill the need of the current scenario. Here, in Phimpme Android, we are displaying the GIF in the splash screen i.e. the next page should get displayed automatically. As we are showing an intro animation, the next activity/page should get opened only after the animation is completed. For achieving this we need a listener which triggers on the loop completion of the GIF image. Glide doesn’t provide any listener of this kind so we cannot Glide here. There is a library named android-gif-drawable, which has the support for a GIF completion listener and many other methods. So, we used this for displaying the Phimpme Android application’s logo animation GIF image in the splash screen. When the GIF completed function gets…