Positioning elements outside an Activity on Android

Question

Is there a way to absolutely position an UI element on Android so that it is located outside an Activity? For example: can you create a fullscreen ImageView simply by moving/resizing an ImageView inside an existing regular Activity instead of creating a new fullscreen activity?

EDIT: Re-reading my question I see I wasn't very clear about what I'm trying to accomplish. I'd like to temporarily extend an element to cover the notification bar at the top of the screen. I need to create a semitranslucent fullscreen overlay but since translucent activities cannot cover the notification bar I'm trying to find out if it's possible for an element to break out of activity's bounds and resize itself to fill the whole screen, top to bottom.

Answer 1

That depends on what specifically you're trying to do. You can easily draw graphics offscreen and then animate their movement into the screen using a Canvas, but this is more for graphics than for user-interface elements. For moving buttons or such, you can have a look at another question here "How to position View off-screen". I gave a brief intro on how to use canvases, but the questioner found another way to do it using a customised linear layout and view animations.

Lastly, if you're trying to zoom and scroll an image around that's larger than the ImageView, there are some sources you can look at for inspiration. I realies this isn't strictly your question, but I'm including it since it might be linked to what you're thinking about. You can find a tutorial on Anddev.org and an open source app on Google Code.