So, I've been working on further revisions to my app. The most notable of these revisions involves switching action bar implementations from GreenDroid to ActionBarSherlock. While this will benefit me tremendously as I'll be able to use native Android 3.0+ components when running on those platforms, it means that I need to start using Fragments as well as the rest of the Android Support Package.

Refactor Refactor Refactor!

I've be saving much of what I have learned for another post, but I felt like sharing this tidbit right now. One thing that quickly became apparent was that a custom dialog that I was using (with positive/negative buttons) was not going to cut it, as the system dialogs were rendering the button strip differently...

The button strip isn't displayed correctly

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So I've been developing an Android application on and off for the past few months. In the latest iteration of the app, I wanted to make some options that were hidden in a menu more discoverable. The accepted way of doing this in Android is through adopting the Action Bar design pattern. As described in the official Android Developers Blog entry on the matter:

The Action bar gives your users onscreen access to the most frequently used actions in your application. We recommend you use this pattern if you want to dedicate screen real estate for common actions. Using this pattern replaces the title bar. It works with the Dashboard, as the upper left portion of the Action bar is where we recommend you place a quick link back to the dashboard or other app home screen.

Awesome, right? A unified UI paradigm for Android. Let me just add the widget to my Activity... umm, uhh... where is it? Nowhere in the Android 2.x SDKs. Instead, Google decided to kill two birds with one stone and encouraged developers to look at the source code for the Google I/O schedule app. This way people could not only learn how to use and implement the pattern, but they can also see what a well-written Android app is supposed to look like.

That's all well and good, but what about the lazy efficient among us, who don't want to reinvent the wheel and write the same instrumentation every time we make an Activity? Once again, Google to the rescue. With the advent of library projects, the ADT plugin for Eclipse makes importing standalone/reusable components into your existing project easy. After this feature was made available, the number of rich, third-party libraries for Android skyrocketed. Among these were several that had reusable Action Bar controls. After some experimentation, I settled on GreenDroid.