title: How to paint lots of images in some kind of surface with pan/zoom?
body: <p>I'm new to Android but I have some Java knowledge and I've started reading the Android documentation and some book but I'm in the very beginning. But even if I've read more, it would be hard to know the recommended way to do what I want without real experience in Android programming...</p>
  
  <p>What I need is to have some kind of surface where I can paint/draw/whatever lots of images, probably PNGs with transparency. I need to be able to pan around and zoom this surface with all those images. I also need to be able to click on any of those images and know which one was clicked.</p>
  
  <p>I've been reading the <a href="http://blogs.sonyericsson.com/developerworld/2010/05/18/android-one-finger-zoom-tutorial-part-1/" rel="nofollow">One Finger Zoom Tutorial</a> from Sony Ericsson developers and it looks like a good solution for what I want to do. But I'm a little confused because that code is for a single bitmap image and I need to have lots of them drawn on some surface/canvas.</p>
  
  <p>I'm thinking of two ways to accomplish this:</p>
  
  <ol>
  <li>Adapt the code somehow so I can draw each image on the <code>Canvas</code> (from <code>onDraw()</code>) but that's where I'm confused, I don't see how can I accomplish this cause the current code is simple for a single image, there's not much to account for.</li>
  <li>Overlay all my images into a single bitmap and use that bitmap as a background for the <code>Canvas</code> (once again, from <code>onDraw()</code>). I could save those images position in the <code>Canvas</code> into an Array or something and use that as reference to see if the user clicked in any of them. I suppose this is possible this way?</li>
  </ol>
  
  <p>So, in reality, here's what I'm asking:</p>
  
  <ul>
  <li>If the first described method above is better, please help me understand how can I achieve such a thing.</li>
  <li>If the second one is better, could you give me some hints how can I overlay all those images, save their positions and detect them with a touch event?</li>
  <li>If there's a better a way to handle all this, I would love to hear about it.</li>
  </ul>
  
  <p>This is for a very basic game I'm thinking of developing and before you go that way, OpenGL is too much for what I need and I want to take one step at a time. First learn Android programming and someday learn OpenGL.</p>