Imho, the Android documentation is really well written and helpful, but it lacks of examples. Hints are given where needed (for example, in the View class docs it’s clearly written that you can’t update the main UI thread from an external thread, and you should use a handler), but they don’t give us concrete examples, as Adobe did with Actionscript 3 docs.

So I think it’s not easy to dive into this ocean without the guide of someone who has already broken his head on a problem. I’m trying to write some simple tutorial for some common tasks. In a few days (maybe hours) I’m going to release a sort of simple cheatsheet that will help updating the views from an external thread/timer. Come back soon if you need it.