ListView is probably the most fundamental UI component of Android and I bet you can hardly find an app which doesn’t use one in a form or another.

By default ListView doesn’t offer much eye candy, it’s basically a scrollable vertical LinearLayout with glowing overscrolls.

But fortunately since ListView can be directly feeded View instances with a custom BaseAdapter, nothing prevents us from spraying some animation on top of them.

Since the data displayed in a ListView is generally queried from some distant network services, there is an opportunity for a visual feedback to inform the user of a freshly retrieved element.

If you have used the Google+ Android application, you are probably familiar with this as new items in your feed are added with a one-time slide-in animation to make it look like they are appended live to your stream.

The good news is that this effect is proposed by default in the Android framework with the AnimationUtils class (in Android.Views.Animations).

This class contains the MakeInChildBottomAnimation method that will automatically craft an Animation instance for you reproducing that slide in effect.

The only thing left to do is to plug in that method invocation in your adapter GetView method like so:

public class MyAdapter : BaseAdapter
{
	// ... other BaseAdapter overrides
	
	public override View GetView (int position, View convertView, ViewGroup parent)
	{
		// Create the View instance used by your ListView (potentially reusing the passed convertView)
		var view = EnsureView (parent, convertView);
		
		// Fetch the data object from your datastore
		var item = data [position];

		// That item will contain a special property that tells if it was freshly retrieved
		if (!item.Consummed) {
			item.Consummed = true;
			// In which case we magically instantiate our effect and launch it directly on the view
			var animation = AnimationUtils.MakeInChildBottomAnimation (view.Context);
			view.StartAnimation (animation);
		}

		return view;
	}
}

Result (a bit jerky thanks to the emulator):

On a final note, I have observed that having the default ListView dividers (the horizontal line between your element views) is causing some graphical glitches for the first load.

If that’s the case for you too, you can disable them in your XML layout by setting:

<ListView
	android:divider="@null"
	android:dividerHeight="0dp" />