Android - have progress bar increase smoothly instead of jumping in bigger steps.

I have some sequence of situations let say 5 situations. The point is I do not know how long each of them will last. I just know when each of those situations is finished.

so imagine this method is called randomly, it is n开发者_Python百科ot randomly but I could not know when will be called.

public void refresh(int i){

}

know I can update the progressbar by increasing him each time refresh will be called, but the user experience will be "see the bar increased by 20%, than wait and nothing moves, than again jump of 20% and stack again, and so on...

The thing I want to achieve is to have something more sooth. I know this is not easy task but I know that someone have meet this problem before, so what are the workarounds ?

If the updates are going to arrive essentially at random, you might consider using a "spinner" instead of a progress bar. The end result is almost the same: the user has some idea that the process is underway. If you want to give a little more information, you can update a text label next to the spinner to indicate which part of the sequence is underway:

I've encountered this before. What I did was to estimate each one of my "situations" as to how much of the 100% progress they would need. So, task 1 would go up to 15% and task 2 might go up to 50%, etc. Keep in mind that this was just a general estimate. Then, within each situation, I would calculate the individual task for 100% completeness and increment that accordingly. Then, I would do the math to calculate the actual progress based on the given task i was in. So, if I was in task 2, I would be calculating based on 100% progress of the specific task calculated against the 35% of the total progress that I estimated task 2 to actually take. I hope this helps you.

Quick question, is it a progress bar you do want?

From what I read, you have no clue of estimated time, only that each chunk is 20%, and you do not know how long each chunk takes, or their time to run through, but you want the bar to move more smooth then large 20% completed chunks.

As you only got 5 measurement points unless you can add another layer of progress on each task to report back, else you are stuck guessing.

If you want to guess, you could make a rough estimate of the time a task will take. Again based on task at hand you might be able to make a good or bad estimate by hard coding expected time. The trick you ask for is looking like progress (hide the fact you are at an uncertain point in an operation 1/5)

Now have the counter move up slowly toward the next mark for the given time (say 1 minute) but as you approach the time, reduce the progress, this will mean that you will either see the bar move faster or slower as you approach expected next point. You will have progress, but it would be pure random guessing. If task end prior you have some "missing" % to make next progress gap larger with, if your slow, the bar slows down more and more.

This is a lot of extra work to show something that is misleading at best, to show the progress has not stuck, you might want to look for other options along with the progress bar.