This is a subclass of android.widget.TextView that exposes a method setDate() which accepts a long Unix timestamp or java.util.Date. The view converts the date into a String which describes the date in terms of time since that timestamp. For example, if the current timestamp is Unix 1453503166 and we call timeSinceTextView.setDate(1453503116), "50 seconds ago" is displayed.
I actually wrote this library before I knew about DateUtils.getRelativeTimeSpanString, but the output is actually quite a bit different. The DateUtils implementation should return localized text and allows for customizable flags. See here for a comparison of the output of different time stamps.
Simply declare a TimeSinceTextView in XML or create one in code.
<com.ddiehl.timesincetextview.TimeSinceTextView
android:id="@+id/timestamp"
android:layout_width="wrap_content"
android:layout_height="wrap_content" />Then call setDate(Date) or setDate(long) with a Unix timestamp, and the text will be automatically generated and set to the view.
((TimeSinceTextView) findViewById(R.id.timestamp)).setDate(1452827942);To get an abbreviated form of the converted text, add app:abbreviated="true" to your XML layout.
<com.ddiehl.timesincetextview.TimeSinceTextView
xmlns:app="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res-auto"
android:layout_width="wrap_content"
android:layout_height="wrap_content"
app:tstv_abbreviated="true" />The class TimeSince also contains static methods which can be used to retrieve a relative timestamp string without an instance of TimeSinceTextView.
repositories {
maven { url "https://jitpack.io" }
}
dependencies {
compile 'com.github.damien5314:TimeSinceTextView:1.+'
}
Pull requests are welcome, in particular in would be nice to have strings.xml translated into as many languages as possible.