What's the correct way to animate a View from one coordinate to another?

Question

I would like to do the following. I have a set of buttons that have some icons on them. When the user taps one, I would like to introduce a new View that starts in the same coo

Answer 1

So, it turns out that this is much more straight forward than I imagined.

I created a full screen RelativeLayout that I only show while the animation is happening.

I get the starting position of my burried button like this (it's funny to see these C style coding mechanisms in Java, they're pretty rare these days:

int fromLoc[] = new int[2];
v.getLocationOnScreen(fromLoc);     
float startX = fromLoc[0];
float startY = fromLoc[1];

So, now I have my starting point.

My end point is an absolute coordinate on the screen, you can assign that however you wish

Then I make a little Animations helper class that lets me pass in all the coordinates, the callback, and the duration of the animation

    public class Animations {
public Animation fromAtoB(float fromX, float fromY, float toX, float toY, AnimationListener l, int speed){


        Animation fromAtoB = new TranslateAnimation(
                Animation.ABSOLUTE, //from xType
                fromX, 
                Animation.ABSOLUTE, //to xType
                toX, 
                Animation.ABSOLUTE, //from yType 
                fromY, 
                Animation.ABSOLUTE, //to yType 
                toY
                 );

        fromAtoB.setDuration(speed);
        fromAtoB.setInterpolator(new AnticipateOvershootInterpolator(1.0f));


        if(l != null)
            fromAtoB.setAnimationListener(l);               
                return fromAtoB;
    }
}

and we need a listener to let us know when the animation is done to clear it

 AnimationListener animL = new AnimationListener() {

        @Override
        public void onAnimationStart(Animation animation) {     
        }

        @Override
        public void onAnimationRepeat(Animation animation) {        
        }

        @Override
        public void onAnimationEnd(Animation animation) {
            //this is just a method to delete the ImageView and hide the animation Layout until we need it again.
            clearAnimation();       
        }
    };

And lastly we throw it all together and press GO

int fromLoc[] = new int[2];
    v.getLocationOnScreen(fromLoc);     
    float startX = fromLoc[0];
    float startY = fromLoc[1];      
    RelativeLayout rl = ((RelativeLayout)findViewById(R.id.sticker_animation_layout));
    ImageView sticker = new ImageView(this);

    int stickerId = getStickerIdFromButton(v);
    if(stickerId == 0){
        stickerAnimationPlaying = false;
        return;         
    }

    float destX = 200.0f;//arbitrary place on screen
    float destY = 200.0f;//arbitrary place on screen

    sticker.setBackgroundResource(stickerId);
    sticker.setLayoutParams(new LayoutParams(LayoutParams.WRAP_CONTENT, LayoutParams.WRAP_CONTENT));

    rl.addView(sticker);
    Animations anim = new Animations();
    Animation a = anim.fromAtoB(startX, startY, destX, destY, animL,750);
    sticker.setAnimation(a);
    a.startNow();