In July 2013 Google announced ActionBarCompat as part of its support library package. This library makes it easy to use the Action Bar that have to support older devices. Many have waited for this to happen ever since the Action Bar was introduced with Honeycomb. I, though, didn’t expect that to happen. After all the […]  Continue Reading  “Migrating from ActionBarSherlock to ActionBarCompat”

As you have seen in the previous tutorials about ActionBarSherlock and the ActionBar, you can add action items easily and they show up either in the ActionBar itself or in the overflow menu. But so far all you could add were normal action items. And those consisted either of icons, of text or of a […]  Continue Reading  “Adding ActionViews to Your ActionBar”

In this tutorial I am going to cover some initial thoughts on navigation. The ActionBar allows multiple navigation modes. In this post I state which navigation modes exist, how to get to the ActionBar object in the first place and how to deal with the so-called up navigation. Less code than in the previous parts […]  Continue Reading  “ActionBarSherlock: Up Navigation”

In my last post I had a look at how to set up a Fragment project that uses a master detail view. This week I am going to show you the necessary steps to make this project use the ActionBarSherlock library. ActionBarSherlock is a library by Jake Wharton, that enables you to use action bars […]  Continue Reading  “Adding ActionBarSherlock to Your Project”

AppBrain published statistics on library usage on Android. This list of libraries is very interesting and to me quite surprising. These stats are presented on three tabs: “Ad networks”, “Social SDKs” and “Development tools”. Here I care about development tools only. For example the two most-used libraries are those of the leading analytics providers, Google […]  Continue Reading  “Surprising Statistics on Library Usage in Android Apps”