Convert String to Drawable

Question

I want to raise a notification showing an icon in the status bar - so far so good, but actually I would like this icon to be a 3 character String.

So my question is: Is there a way to convert my String into a Drawable to display it as Icon in the status bar?

EDIT: I recently found an app which does something similar - Battery Indicator

It shows the current battery level as notification icon in the status bar - I wonder if it really uses different 100 images

Answer 1

Have you looked at the API Demos > App > Notifications > Status Bar?

If you have limited number of String options (like Smileys) you can create drawables for each of those Strings.

Answer 2

Short: No, you can't.

Long: The notification needs a R.drawable.something for the icon and you can't create it on runtime.

Answer 3

you can make your own custom drawable that would work just like the textview widget except it is a drawable instead of a view. The textview class is just a container for the drawable that contains the text.