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androidsurfaceview
murielK
murielK

Reputation: 1030

Android SurfaceView

Can anyone explain me what is android SurfaceView? I have been trough the android development web site and read about and i cant still understand it.

Why or when is it use in android application development.Maybe a good example if possible

Thank you

Upvotes: 0

Views: 512

Answers (2)

Sachini Samarasinghe
Sachini Samarasinghe

Reputation: 1111

View or SurfaceView comes into picture when you need custom design in the android layout instead of using existing android widgets provided from android. Here the main difference of View and SurfaceView is drawing threads. View is drawn in the UI thread and SurfaceView can be drawn in a separate thread.

Therefore SurfaceView is more appropriate when it requires to update UI rapidly or rendering takes too much time (eg: animations, video playback, camera preview etc..)

Upvotes: 0

Ian Wong
Ian Wong

Reputation: 1687

Android SurfaceView is an object that is associated with a window (but behind a window), using which you can directly manipulate the canvas and draw whatever you like.

What is interesting about the implementation of SurfaceView is that although it lies BEHIND a window, as long as it has any content to show, Android framework will let the corresponding pixels on that window to be transparent, thus making the surface view visible.

It is most likely to be used for building a game or browser, where you want a graphical renderer to calculate pixels for you while you can also use java code to control the normal APP logic.

If you are new to normal Android programming, chances are you do not need to know too much about it.

For further information, see this and the official documentation.

Upvotes: 1

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