Hey folks, I’m trying to figure out how to make a cool refresh animation in my Android app. I saw this neat trick in the new Gmail app where they don’t use the usual hidden row that pulls down. Instead, they show this slick animated message right above the action bar.
It’s got this cool moving horizontal line and everything. I’ve been digging through the Android SDK docs, but I can’t seem to find anything about this in the action bar stuff. Is this some secret feature I’m missing, or did the Gmail team cook this up themselves?
I’d love to add something like this to my app. Any ideas on how to pull it off? Maybe there’s a library out there that can help? Thanks in advance for any tips!
Having tackled a similar challenge, I can say it’s definitely possible to create a custom pull-to-refresh animation like Gmail’s. The key is to implement your own ViewGroup that responds to touch events and manages the animation states.
Start by overriding onInterceptTouchEvent and onTouchEvent in your custom ViewGroup. Use a ValueAnimator to control the progress of your refresh animation based on the user’s drag distance. For the horizontal line effect, you can use a custom drawable with a gradient and animate its bounds.
Integrating this with your existing layout might require some refactoring, especially if you’re using a RecyclerView or ListView. You’ll need to carefully manage the z-index to ensure your custom refresh view appears above your content but below the action bar.
It’s a bit of work, but the end result can significantly enhance your app’s user experience. Just make sure to thoroughly test on different screen sizes and Android versions.
yo, i’ve seen that gmail refresh thing too. pretty slick! from what i know, it’s not a built-in android feature. gmail team probably made it themselves. you could try making a custom view that sits on top of ur content and animate it when the user pulls down. it’s gonna take some work tho. maybe check out some open-source libraries? they might have somethin close to what ur lookin for
I’ve actually been working on something similar for my own app recently. From what I’ve gathered, the Gmail team likely custom-built that animation. The standard SwipeRefreshLayout doesn’t offer that level of customization out of the box.
What I ended up doing was creating a custom view that sits above my main content. It contains the animated elements (like that moving line) and gets triggered when the user pulls down. Then I used ObjectAnimator to handle the actual animations.
It took some trial and error, but the results were worth it. The key is to make sure your custom refresh view responds smoothly to touch events and ties into your data loading logic cleanly.
If you’re not up for building it from scratch, check out the ‘Android-PullToRefresh’ library on GitHub. It offers more customization options than the standard implementation and might get you closer to what you’re after without reinventing the wheel.