Android sidebar like facebook or firefox

Question

With the new facebook app it comes with an hidden sidebar that I would love to use something like that in my applications. It looks kinda like the sidebars that firefox mobile have...

Do you have any idea how to implement it besides re-implementing the ViewPager? I've tried with an HorizontalScrollView but that would also lead to re-implementation of it...

I'm not seeing any other way besides these two... any suggestions?

Thanks in advance

Answer 1

I came up with a solution... I don't know if it is perfect but it is working well.

So what I did was a single FrameLayout with both of the Layouts stacked together and then I just animate the top layout to slide to the right of the screen (just need to call the slideTo or scrollBy. And basically it's that! Quite simple and effective! (the code though is not very pretty :P)

EDIT:

Some code samples.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<FrameLayout xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android"
    android:layout_width="fill_parent"
    android:layout_height="fill_parent"
    android:background="#FFF" >

        <include
        android:id="@+id/menu_layout"
            layout="@layout/menu_list"
            android:visibility="invisible"/>

        <include
            android:id="@+id/news_list_parent"
            layout="@layout/main_news_list" 
            />

</FrameLayout>

This is the layout xml, quite simpe. The included .xml are simple LinearLayouts with a heading and a listview.

The "magic" happens in the animation:

protected void applyTransformation(float interpolatedTime, Transformation t) {
    int newOffset;
    if(expanded) {
        newOffset = 0;
        newOffset = (int)(endOffset*(1-interpolatedTime));
    } else {
        newOffset = (int)(endOffset*(interpolatedTime));
    }
    view.scrollTo(-newOffset, 0);
}

The endOffset is the target movement. I set it before I start the animation, and the View I want to animate (in this case is the view with the id=news_list_parent) it is set on the constructor.

But just to understand how that works make a button and its listener would do something like this:

if(viewBeneath.getVisibility() == View.INVISIBLE) {
    viewBeneath.setVisibility(View.Visible);
    viewToSlide.slideTo(-(width-50), 0);
}

And finally override the back button to do the opposite of the button

if(viewBeneath.getVisibility() == View.VISIBLE) {
    viewToSlide.slideTo(0, 0);
    viewBeneath.setVisibility(View.Visible);
}

Read this as pseudo-code =) This is what I did in the beginning, that code is lost :P