Calling TextView.setText() periodically causes the UI to jerk

Question

I'm coding an audio player where a thread updates the TextView representing the track's elapsed time, every 250 milliseconds.

The display looks like this:

1:30/2:30<-----Progress Bar----->

TextView 1 is 1:30/ and TextView 2 is 2:30.

Both are set to wrap_content for width.

What happens is that on every 250 millisecond cycle, the thread checks the current time and updates TextView 1. For this brief moment, TextView 2 and the progress bar get pushed momentarily to the right by about 2-4 pixels. Then they come back to place until the same thing happens during the next cycle.

I don't know what's happening. There are no trailing space characters, etc and everything should, theoretically, be working smoothly but it's not.

Can anyone help me out? I'm hoping someone else may have faced a similar problem....

PS: I initialize TextView 1 to 0:00/ and TextView 2 to 0:00 in the layout XML file and the code handles it from there.

Answer 1

Considered using a fixed width (16-20dip?) instead of wrap_content for those fields? The variable-pitched font is going to move the progress bar around, since 1:11 is narrower than, say, 1:59.

Or go to a fixed-pitch font, if the times will always be the same number of characters.