What is the right way to make a widget that changes content every 6-8 seconds ,Android

Question

The closest example of what i want to accomplish is the "Engadget" widget. It updates it's data from the internet every 5-10 minutes and "scrolls" to the stories every 5-7 seconds. I imagine it sets the 5 -10 minutes interval to the widget's provider to call the onUpdate without the inbuild limitations , something like that ..

AlarmManager alarms = (AlarmManager) getApplicationContext().getSystemService(Context.ALARM_SERVICE);
alarms.setRepeating(AlarmManager.ELAPSED_REALTIME, SystemClock.elapsedRealtime(), updateRateSeconds * 1000, newPending); 

Then the real issue.. to update the widgets content without calling onUpdate.

Here i imaging that inside the widget provider exists a timer or a Runnable that everytime it get's called it reschedules itself with something like that

public void onUpdate(Context context, AppWidgetManager appWidgetManager,
            int[] appWidgetIds) {
...

    mHandler.removeCallbacks(mUpdateTimeTask);
    mHandler.postDelayed(mUpdateTimeTask, 1000);
}

.

private Runnable mUpdateTimeTask = new Runnable() {
           public void run() {

           final long start = mStartTime;
           long millis = SystemClock.uptimeMillis() - start;
           int seconds = (int) (millis / 1000);


           int minutes = seconds / 60;
               seconds     = seconds % 60;
...

     mHandler.postAtTime(this,start + (((minutes * 60) + seconds + 1) * 1000));
}

Then on widget provider inside onDeleted and onDisabled

i removeCallbacks mHandler.removeCallbacks(mUpdateTimeTask);

Is there anything wrong with that scheme? Do i need to make a service to update the widget from there and keep it alive without setting an AlarmManager to the widget's configuration? For some reason i get double calls on onUpdate and the runnable keeps running after i delete the widget.

Answer 1

Have a look at ViewFlipper. You can use it to update the data once for a set of items and then set how frequently they cycle.