How to change a TextView every second in Android

Question

I\'ve made a simple Android music player. I want to have a TextView that shows the current time in the song in minutes:seconds format. So the first thing I tried was to make

Answer 1

I think the below blog article clearly gives a very nice solution. Especially, if you are a background service and want to regularly update your UI from this service using a timer-like functionality. It really helped me, much more than the 2007 blog link posted by MusiGenesis above.

https://www.websmithing.com/2011/02/01/how-to-update-the-ui-in-an-android-activity-using-data-from-a-background-service/

Answer 2

what about this:

    int delay = 5000; // delay for 5 sec.
    int period = 1000; // repeat every sec.

    Timer timer = new Timer();
    timer.scheduleAtFixedRate(new TimerTask()
        {
            public void run()
            {
                //your code
            }
        }, delay, period);

Answer 3

You have to use a handler to handle the interaction with the GUI. Specifically a thread cannot touch ANYTHING on the main thread. You do something in a thread and if you NEED something to be changed in your main thread, then you call a handler and do it there.

Specifically it would look something like this:

Thread t = new Thread(new Runnable(){ ... do stuff here

Handler.postMessage(); }

Then somewhere else in your code, you do

Handler h = new Handler(){

something something... modify ui element here }

Idea its like this, thread does something, notifies the handler, the handler then takes this message and does something like update a textview on the UI thread.

Answer 4

This is one more Timer example and I'm using this code in my project. https://stackoverflow.com/a/18028882/1265456

Answer 5

Use a Timer for this (instead of a while loop with a Thread.Sleep in it). See this article for an example of how to use a timer to update a UI element periodically:

Updating the UI from a timer

Edit: updated way-back link, thanks to Arialdo: http://web.archive.org/web/20100126090836/http://developer.android.com/intl/zh-TW/resources/articles/timed-ui-updates.html

Edit 2: non way-back link, thanks to gatoatigrado: http://android-developers.blogspot.com/2007/11/stitch-in-time.html