The ShowcaseView library is designed to highlight and showcase specific parts of apps to the user with a distinctive and attractive overlay. This library is great for pointing out points of interest for users, or obscure but useful items.

The library is based on the "Cling" view found in the Launcher on Ice-Cream Sandwich and Jelly Bean, but extended to be easier to use.

To achieve a full-screen overlay, place a ShowcaseView as high in your layout's view hierarchy as you can. To set the view to showcase, call ShowcaseView.setShowcaseView(..). By default, the ShowcaseView will show every time the layout is shown, but this can be altered by calling ShowcaseView.setShotType(..) before setShowcaseView(..). Using TYPE_ONE_SHOT will only show the ShowcaseView the first time the layout is shown.

As ShowcaseView extends a RelativeLayout, you can add items to the ShowcaseView, such as a button to hide it or text to explain what you are showcasing. If you give the button the id "@id/showcase_button", it will, by default, close the ShowcaseView once pressed. This behaviour can be overridden by using ShowcaseView.overrideButtonClick(..).

Styles are included to maintain consistently in ShowcaseViews. Buttons should use the style ShowcaseButton, with title text using ShowcaseTitleText and standard text using ShowcaseText.

By default, the ShowcaseView will block all touch events except inside the showcased circle. To override this, simply call ShowcaseView.blockNonShowcasedTouches(false).

At the moment, this library is quite bare. However, I hope to add the following features very soon:

• Support for showcasing raw co-ordinates Use setShowcasePosition(x,y)
• Support for showcasing ActionBar items
• Variable sized circles for showcasing
• Easier usage
• On-demand showing and hiding of ShowcaseView Use show() and hide()

Copyright Alex Curran © 2012. All rights reserved.

This library is disributed under an Apache 2.0 License.