This tutorial shows how to add sparkle to your apps with an animated splash screen. Making heavy use of the Android Animation classes, it shows how to add an image as the splash screen and tweak it interactively, so you can get it just right without having to constantly restart the app just to see the effect. For good measure, the Preferences system is given a hearty workout too, so whatever tweaks you apply are stored ready for when your app is next run. The splash screens can be entirely graphical, so don't have to be rectangular any more!

Tutorial: CoolSplash Skill: Medium    Market install   Download source

Splash screens often serve a purpose beyond the cosmetic. When an app needs to perform some housekeeping at startup, for example, showing the user something attractive takes away a little of the pain of an enforced delay. Also, they can show useful information dynamically - it's perfectly feasible to mention new updates and so on using them. I'd coded a few apps which used the standard dialog as the splash screen and for some kinds that's still a good choice - business apps for example. For extra sparkle though, using images as Views can give great effects, especially when combined with some animations.

Here's how it looks:

CoolSplash shows you how to use these animated image views as splash screens. True to form, it eats its own dogfood by using the parameters you set as its own splash screen. You can control the whole image onscreen duration, the time the image is on screen whilst not being animated, the image itself and the effects for fade, zoom and spin.

The video shows what happens when you tweak a few settings: