SmoothProgressBar

This is an Android library that provides nicer-looking loading indicators for mobile apps. When an Android app is doing something in the background and wants to show the user that work is happening, it typically shows a spinning or sliding progress bar. The standard Android progress bar looks plain and dated. This library replaces it with a smoother, more customizable version.

It comes in two forms. The first is a horizontal bar that slides across the screen, similar to the loading animation seen in the Google Now app. The second is a circular spinner. Both are indeterminate, meaning they do not show a percentage or specific amount of progress, just the fact that something is happening. You can control things like color, speed, stroke width, the number of sliding sections in the horizontal bar, and whether the animation mirrors or reverses direction.

Adding it to an Android project is done by including a single line in the Gradle build file, which is the standard way Android developers add third-party libraries. No manual downloading is required. The library supports Android API level 7 and above for the horizontal bar and API level 14 and above for the circular variant.

Once added, developers can use it in a few ways: by dropping the custom view directly into a layout XML file and setting properties there, by defining a style in a theme file and applying it globally, or by constructing the progress drawable in Java code and attaching it to an existing progress bar widget. Multiple colors can be assigned to a single bar, cycling through them as it animates, similar to what some Google apps display. The library is licensed under the Apache 2.0 license.