Utilize the window background during cold start time (the time between user launches your app and Activity.onCreate() is called) to make your app look faster.

This project comes with some templates for Material Designed apps, but you can also roll your own if you wish.

// TODO

This project was inspired by the pro-tip Use cold start time effectively with a branded launch theme — Pro-tip by +Ian Lake.

But instead of using a short transient product logo as preview, I want to use a background with an AppBar on it, just like the old days with framework-managed ActionBar, which gives user the illusion of a quicker start up and ensures visual consistency.

This project has been around in my mind for several months, until I found my way to generate drawables with templates.

This project generates nine-patch drawables for use as android:windowBackground.

Only static drawables can be loaded by framework as preview, and all other drawables will only retain aspect ratio when width/height is set. So we need to use nine-patch.

However, nine-patches need to be bitmaps, but we have various dimension sizes changing with configuration, and we still have to retain the one-pixel border while scaling up the content area.

I don't want to keep a separate file for each combination of configuration (which can be 20 if you support tablet), but instead use a single template for nine-patch generation. After a lot of (painful) trial-and-error with XSLT and sed, I suddenly found the good old bash (which is string-oriented) a viable solution for this problem.

The solution, a "new" format called shsvg (Shell SVG), is implemented as in DreaminginCodeZH/AndroidSVGScripts and used by this project.