App UI / UX – Part 5

Previously in this series we’ve looked at improving the ActionBar behaviour of our temperature app, but there’s another annoyance that we can fix by tinkering with the ActionBar: When the user performs a bluetooth device discovery scan there is no visual indication that the scan is in progress, and more importantly when the scan completes.…

ActionBarCompat – Part 5

Previously in this series we have worked through porting the existing ActionBar tutorial code to work with ActionBarCompat and therefore be compatible with Android API 7 and later. In this concluding article of the series we’ll compare the example app on both API 7 and API 18 devices to see the differences in UI that…

ActionBarCompat – Part 3

In the previous article we converted our resources for the code from the previous ActionBar series to use ActionBarCompat. In this article we’ll have a look at the Java code and begin looking at the changes that we need to make it backwardly compatible to API level 7 using ActionBarCompat.

ActionBarCompat – Part 2

In the previous article we began converting the existing project from the Styling Android series on ActionBar to use the ActionBarCompat library. Once we had got a Gradle build working, we found that we had a lot of resource errors once we switched the compiler to compile against API 7. In this article we’ll look…

ActionBarCompat – Part 1

Back in August 2012, the first article in a series of 12 was posted to Styling Android which provided an in-depth look at the ActionBar. It had been rumoured for a while before I/O 2013 that Google were working on a compatibility library for ActionBar, and this was duly announced at I/O. In this series…

Styling the ActionBar – Part 4

In the previous article in this series we applied a style to the navigation Spinner and its associated drop down ListView, but found that this style did not get applied to the Spinner that we added manually using the actionViewClass attribute of the MenuItem definition in our menu XML. In this article we’ll find out…