Change Window Background and overlaying views on them

[Monu Tripathi]

I have noticed that on Mobile applications when you transition between Activities, if drawing the View hierarchy of the new Activity takes time we see a blank, dark screen. This is the default background for the Window. I know that this can be avoided most of the times by offloading time consuming tasks to background Threads and making (Activity Life cycle)callbacks return ASAP.

However, my question is -

Is it possible to change this background? Like give it a color consistent with applications theme or maybe even have a video stream playing in background? We can then have Activities just painted on top of it?


Thanks.

[Peter Johnson]

The ListView has the same behavior - background changes to black when scrolling. Not sure if the fix for that would work for your case. Here is a good explanation of the ListView issue and solution:
http://android-developers.blogspot.com/2009/01/why-is-my-list-black-android.html