Honeycomb Animations And The New Android Animation System.

Android Developer / Engineer Chet Haase has posted an article covering Honeycomb's new animation system, a set of APIs in a new package, android.animation.
The new system is said to bring more functionality to Androids animation like extending the animation beyond the view objects and the widening of the scope to animate such as background colors of a view.

The new animation system in Honeycomb is not specific to Views, is not limited to specific properties on objects, and is not just a visual animation system. Instead, it is a system that is all about animating values over time, and assigning those values to target objects and properties - any target objects and properties. So you can move a View or fade it in. And you can move a Drawable inside a View. And you can animate the background color of a Drawable. In fact, you can animate the values of any data structure; you just tell the animation system how long to run for, how to evaluate between values of a custom type, and what values to animate between, and the system handles the details of calculating the animated values and setting them on the target object.

Rather than just describing the capabilities of the new Android animation system, Chet walks one through the main classes of the new system, and provides some sample code as well.

After a very lengthy write up, he says there is much more to the system and invites us to his blog at graphics-geek.blogspot.com for upcoming articles, tutorials, and videos on this and related topics. He also invites one to check out the API demos, read the overview of Property Animation posted with the 3.0 SDK, dive into the code, and just play with it.

Yes make those apps sleek and better! I am awaiting my Motorola XOOM, the WiFi edition.

Android Developers Blog: Animation in Honeycomb