Creating a pseudo android verbose boot animation

[Guest cortiis]

I am creating a pseudo verbose boot animation. Need help from you guys. I would like to have some usable and practical ideas about what all might be displayed in the boot process.

Thanks.

Edited April 21, 2010 by cortiis

[Guest skenmy]

Run adb logcat when booting your phone, and you will get exactly what is logged during the boot process =D

[Guest Alastyr]

and don't ruin it like the other guy did and make it stick on a fat "Loading...."-animation at the end....

[Guest zorm]

Run adb logcat when booting your phone, and you will get exactly what is logged during the boot process =D

I was just going to suggest that. I don't know if that info will include any details you'd not want public, but I would check that too.

and don't ruin it like the other guy did and make it stick on a fat "Loading...."-animation at the end....

I don't know if this is a stupid idea, & it wouldn't be trivial, but you could make the speed at which the text is displayed be configurable so a user of a given ROM can set it to approximately match their boot time. Easiest way would be to include a PC based utility with the boot animation which tweaks the timings. Failing that maybe release it with a few available variations in timing? Just an idea to help add to the realism. Hmm, now I definitely am getting silly: what about an app that creates such an animation based on a logcat ripped off the host phone? Mind you, if you're going to that much trouble it might not be a great deal more effort to patch Android to do the job properly.

Edited April 20, 2010 by zorm

[Guest]

I was just going to suggest that. I don't know if that info will include any details you'd not want public, but I would check that too.

I don't know if this is a stupid idea, & it wouldn't be trivial, but you could make the speed at which the text is displayed be configurable so a user of a given ROM can set it to approximately match their boot time. Easiest way would be to include a PC based utility with the boot animation which tweaks the timings. Failing that maybe release it with a few available variations in timing? Just an idea to help add to the realism. Hmm, now I definitely am getting silly: what about an app that creates such an animation based on a logcat ripped off the host phone? Mind you, if you're going to that much trouble it might not be a great deal more effort to patch Android to do the job properly.

What you see on the screen is a simple animated gif, its not actually text so changing its run speed is a matter of editing the file and changing the time it pauses between frames.

I'm sure you could do something like that with aalib and imagemagick to turn out an animated gif from the text output in real time. You'd probably want to edit out the duplicate frames that would be created in the capture process or you'd have a huge file in no time.

[Guest zorm]

What you see on the screen is a simple animated gif, its not actually text so changing its run speed is a matter of editing the file and changing the time it pauses between frames.

I'm sure you could do something like that with aalib and imagemagick to turn out an animated gif from the text output in real time. You'd probably want to edit out the duplicate frames that would be created in the capture process or you'd have a huge file in no time.

Indeed, I realise that. Actually, isn't it gif based under Cupcake & reliant on a png sequence for Eclair? I might have the latter wrong as I've only read about this stuff in passing, not having wanted to implement anything myself. Certainly it would need careful construction. I'm not sure how animated gifs are encoded, but if they allow part of a frame to reference part of the preceeding, the only new information in each frame would be a single line of rendered text & there'd be as many frames as there are lines of text.

[Edit:] Shame; it seems gifs aren't that sophisticated. Does Android's method for positioning boot animation images allow for them to be positioned partially off screen? One image could hold all, or a big chunk, of the lines & be shifted up one line for each frame, perhaps?

Edited April 20, 2010 by zorm

[Guest cortiis]

adb logcat generates a lot of data. I was thinking of some more kewl stuff. For now I am working with the data generated by logcat.

Update 1: Am able to dynamically generate boot GIF's using GD library and PHP. The script reads data from a text file and creates images. Then it goes on to create an animated GIF with those images.

You can control the speed and the content of the animation. See the attachment for a sample.

I think it might take some time but what Zorm suggested looks like a viable option. Will post more when completed.

Edited April 21, 2010 by cortiis

[Guest cortiis]

How about something like this?

[Guest zorm]

That is pretty cool :huh:

[Edit:] Hmm, if you wanted you could improve authenticity by changing the frame duration for certain frames, to mimic the fact some steps during boot do result in longer pauses than others.

Edited April 27, 2010 by zorm

[Guest cortiis]

Ok, an issue came up. I am using the above animated GIF to create my update.zip. Once I apply it, it shows as the bootscreen. The problem is the colors in the images. The TUX is completely disfigured and the white text is changed to a brownish yellowish color. I know it has to do something with the GIF creation process. I am missing some setting here. Anybody with the requisite knowledge, please help.