How to change a TextView every second in Android

Question

I've made a simple Android music player. I want to have a TextView that shows the current time in the song in minutes:seconds format. So the first thing I tried was to make the activity Runnable and put this in run():

int position = 0;
while (MPService.getMP() != null && position<MPService.duration) {
try {
    Thread.sleep(1000);
    position = MPService.getSongPosition();
} catch (InterruptedException e) {
    return;
}

// ... convert position to formatted minutes:seconds string ...

currentTime.setText(time); // currentTime = (TextView) findViewById(R.id.current_time);

But that fails because I can only touch a TextView in the thread where it was created. So then I tried using runOnUiThread(), but that doesn't work because then Thread.sleep(1000) is called repeatedly on the main thread, so the activity just hangs at a blank screen. So any ideas how I can solve this?

---

new code:

private int startTime = 0;
private Handler timeHandler = new Handler();
private Runnable updateTime = new Runnable() {
    public void run() {
        final int start = startTime;
        int millis = appService.getSongPosition() - start;
        int seconds = (int) ((millis / 1000) % 60);
        int minutes = (int) ((millis / 1000) / 60);
        Log.d("seconds",Integer.toString(seconds)); // no problem here
        if (seconds < 10) {
            // this is hit, yet the text never changes from the original value of 0:00
            currentTime.setText(String.format("%d:0%d",minutes,seconds));
        } else {
            currentTime.setText(String.format("%d:%d",minutes,seconds));
        }
        timeHandler.postAtTime(this,(((minutes*60)+seconds+1)*1000));
    }

};

private ServiceConnection onService = new ServiceConnection() {
public void onServiceConnected(ComponentName className,
        IBinder rawBinder) {
      appService = ((MPService.LocalBinder)rawBinder).getService();

    // start playing the song, etc. 

    if (startTime == 0) {
        startTime = appService.getSongPosition();
        timeHandler.removeCallbacks(updateTime);
        timeHandler.postDelayed(updateTime,1000);
    }
}

Answer 1

what about this:

    int delay = 5000; // delay for 5 sec.
    int period = 1000; // repeat every sec.

    Timer timer = new Timer();
    timer.scheduleAtFixedRate(new TimerTask()
        {
            public void run()
            {
                //your code
            }
        }, delay, period);

Answer 2

Use a Timer for this (instead of a while loop with a Thread.Sleep in it). See this article for an example of how to use a timer to update a UI element periodically:

Updating the UI from a timer

Edit: updated way-back link, thanks to Arialdo: http://web.archive.org/web/20100126090836/http://developer.android.com/intl/zh-TW/resources/articles/timed-ui-updates.html

Edit 2: non way-back link, thanks to gatoatigrado: http://android-developers.blogspot.com/2007/11/stitch-in-time.html