Program freezes during Thread.sleep() and with Timer

Never use Thread.sleep() when code is executing on the Event Dispatch Thread.

Instead you should use a Swing Timer to schedule your animation.

See the sections from the Swing tutorial on:

1. Concurrency in Swing
2. How to Use Timers

Or if you don’t want to use a Timer, then you can use a SwingWorker (as described in the tutorial on concurrency) and then just publish() the image after you change it. Then you can use a Thread.sleep() since the SwingWorker doesn’t execute on the EDT.

Simple Timer example:

import java.awt.*;
import java.awt.event.*;
import java.util.*;
import javax.swing.*;
import javax.swing.Timer;

public class TimerTime extends JPanel implements ActionListener
{
    private JLabel timeLabel;
    private int count = 0;

    public TimerTime()
    {
        timeLabel = new JLabel( new Date().toString() );
        add( timeLabel );

        Timer timer = new Timer(1000, this);
        timer.setInitialDelay(1);
        timer.start();
    }

    @Override
    public void actionPerformed(ActionEvent e)
    {
        //  Update the time

        timeLabel.setText( new Date().toString() );
        count++;

        //  Stop after 10 events have been generated

        if (count == 10)
        {
            Timer timer = (Timer)e.getSource();
            timer.stop();
            System.out.println( "Timer stopped" );
        }
    }

    private static void createAndShowGUI()
    {
        JFrame frame = new JFrame("TimerTime");
        frame.setDefaultCloseOperation(JFrame.EXIT_ON_CLOSE);
        frame.add( new TimerTime() );
        frame.setLocationByPlatform( true );
        frame.pack();
        frame.setVisible( true );
    }

    public static void main(String[] args)
    {
        EventQueue.invokeLater( () -> createAndShowGUI() );
    }
}