ShowcaseView is a library which helps give your app that extra flair. It is designed to easily insert reliable, Holo-designed guides into your app, to point out features that users might not notice, such as gestures.
Version 2 of the API (available now) was designed to be super simple to use, and now requires a single call
(one of the insertShowcaseView(...) methods) to place a ShowcaseView into your app hierarchy.
Whilst there are additional options, the single method above - which comes in many different flavours - will
produce a quick yet professional output.
Version 2 also added support for showcasing action bar items. This currently doesn't work for split ActionBars, but that should hopefully be coming soon.
ShowcaseView can be customised by providing a set of ShowcaseView.ConfigOptions with
initialisation. The customisations available include:
ConfigOptions.shotType
(TYPE_NO_LIMIT or TYPE_ONE_SHOT respectively)ConfigOptions.insert
with INSERT_TO_DECOR or INSERT_TO_CONTENT respectively)ShowcaseView.setTextColors(..)More detailed theming can be achieved using the showcaseViewStyle theme attribute,
allowing customisation of the background color and text colours via a theme. There are also pre-defined
normal (ShowcaseView) and light (ShowcaseView.Light) themes for use
in Holo Dark/Light situations. Check out the sample project for theme examples!
The library is compatible all the way down to Android 2.1, which is API level 7.
There have been multiple requests for hosting this project on Maven. I don't have much experience with Maven, but plan to have a go at hosting it there too - I will report back once finished.
My Google+ page is the easiest way to contact me directly. Please use the official issue tracker to raise problems/report bugs.