Animated Icon Redux

Lately we've been putting animated icons all over the UI to provide feedback about actions that are in progress. The spinning arrows are an animated GIF, while the spinning dial is dynamically generated with Java2D. Both icons are used just like any other icon (set and forget). No special coding is needed to get them to animate. This is how animated icons should behave.






The Icon interface's paintIcon method carries enough information for the icon to trigger its own repaint when it needs to display the next frame. Internally, the spinning arrows icon tracks the component on which it was painted as well as the location. Using this information, each time we want to display a new animation frame, we just walk the list of repaint locations and request a repaint on each of the stored items.

After testing this method out on a variety of components, I realized that this would be a superior method of animating icons in trees, tables, and lists (or any other component that makes use of CellRendererPane. With just a few tweaks, the logic was refactored to wrap animated GIF icons so that when they are used within a tree, table, or list, they are automatically refreshed as necessary. This is a much cleaner solution than the one I posted earlier.

I have a generic icon loader for my apps, so if the loader detects an animated GIF, it automatically wraps it in an AnimatedIcon and I don't have to worry about manually tracking animations.

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