Using the “animated circle” in an ImageView while loading stuff

Question

I am currently using in my application a listview that need maybe one second to be displayed.

What I currently do is using the @id/android:empty property of the list

Answer 1

This is generally referred to as an Indeterminate Progress Bar or Indeterminate Progress Dialog.

Combine this with a Thread and a Handler to get exactly what you want. There are a number of examples on how to do this via Google or right here on SO. I would highly recommend spending the time to learn how to use this combination of classes to perform a task like this. It is incredibly useful across many types of applications and will give you a great insight into how Threads and Handlers can work together.

I'll get you started on how this works:

The loading event starts the dialog:

//maybe in onCreate
showDialog(MY_LOADING_DIALOG);
fooThread = new FooThread(handler);
fooThread.start();

Now the thread does the work:

private class FooThread extends Thread {
    Handler mHandler;

    FooThread(Handler h) {
        mHandler = h;
    }

    public void run() { 
        //Do all my work here....you might need a loop for this

        Message msg = mHandler.obtainMessage();
        Bundle b = new Bundle();                
        b.putInt("state", 1);   
        msg.setData(b);
        mHandler.sendMessage(msg);
    }
}

Finally get the state back from the thread when it is complete:

final Handler handler = new Handler() {
    public void handleMessage(Message msg) {
        int state = msg.getData().getInt("state");
        if (state == 1){
            dismissDialog(MY_LOADING_DIALOG);
            removeDialog(MY_LOADING_DIALOG);
        }
    }
};