Introduction

Animations can be both visually appealing and functional, as demonstrated with the simple button press. The graphical representation of the button press brings the app alive, plus it provides a functional value by giving the user a visual response to the event.

The Android Framework provides several animation systems to make it easier to include animations in your own application. They include the following:

• View Animation: (The original animation system.) It usually requires less code but has limited animation options

• Property Animation: It's a more flexible system allowing animation of any property of any object

• Drawable Animation: It uses drawable resources to create frame-by-frame animations (like a movie)

The Property Animation system was introduced in Android 3.0, and it is usually preferred over View Animation because of the flexibility. The main drawbacks to View Animation include:

• Limited aspects of what can be animated—such as scale and rotation

• Can only animate the contents...