Designing a Custom Progress bar with timed breaks in Android
Article Summary
Sarina Dhamija from OLX Engineering tackles a tricky Android UI challenge: building a circular progress bar that shows pause breaks during video recording. Think Instagram Stories meets custom video capture.
This deep dive walks through creating a reusable Android component that visualizes recording progress with visible pause indicators. The article breaks down the implementation into three phases: UI rendering, state management, and the drawing logic that makes it all work.
Key Takeaways
- Uses ValueAnimator with custom interpolators to handle smooth circle expansion and progress tracking
- State machine manages four recording states: INIT, RESUMED, RECORDING, and PAUSED
- Sweep angle calculations based on pause/resume timestamps create visual break indicators
- Paint objects dynamically switch colors to distinguish active recording from paused segments
- Complete implementation available on GitHub as reusable component
A production-ready custom progress bar that elegantly handles timed breaks through state management and calculated arc drawing, perfect for video recording UIs.
About This Article
Sarina Dhamija at OLX Engineering needed to show video recording progress with visible pause breaks. The challenge was drawing dynamic arcs that could track multiple pause-resume cycles and calculate timestamps accurately.
The team built a RecorderStateManager state machine with four states: INIT, RECORDING, PAUSED, and RESUMED. They paired it with ValueAnimator and Paint objects that change colors based on the current state. White shows progress, transparent shows breaks. The sweep angles come from calculated pause and resume times.
This Android component works across different use cases like video recording and uploading. Teams can reuse it without rebuilding from scratch. Down the road, they can add template-based customization for shape, size, and state-specific icons to make it more interactive.