How to create a overlay with help bubbles on Android?

Question

I recall seeing some android apps having a help overlay that greys the screen a bit and provides textbubbles with helpfull information pointing to various UI objects.

I thought this to be easy, just create a FrameLayout with 2 layers, 1 content, 1 helpoverlay. However, it appears that you can't use a RelativeLayout with items that are based upon another RelativeLayout ?

How would I go to position these bubbles? Manually?

Answer 1

Use a PopupWindow . a sample implementation can be found here : http://sree.cc/google/android/android-popup-window

You can use the popupWindow.showAsDropdown(View anchor) method to attach the popup to any view or manually set the x and y co-ordinates of the popup to be shown.

[EDIT]: you may also want to have a look here : http://code.google.com/p/simple-quickactions/