Develop Reference

How to make the overflow button (the three dots) open settings right away?

I do not want to show a menu for only Settings and About, that's why i want the overflow button to open (immediately when clicked) a unified Settings-About page, the same way Instagram does.
At first i thought i might just do a menu with one action that is set to always Shown and has the overflow button icon (the three dots). But there are a lot of icons for different themes and i also think this wouldn't be correct for devices with a menu button.

Follow this:
Go to style, change your theme DarkActionBar to noActionBar.
Add the android design support to your gradle.
Add toolbar to your xml
Add Imageview or imageviewbutton inside your toolbar
Find the three dot image in drawable using image asset
Add your three dot drawable as src of your imageview.
Set oncClick then intent.

Hide home as up indicator on Android actionbar

I am trying to custom our home as up indicator on our Android ActionBar. I have change the icon and padding using theme style.
<item name="android:homeAsUpIndicator">#drawable/fb_back</item>
While this make the function
getActionBar().setDisplayHomeAsUpEnabled(false);
become useless. Because in some situation I want to hide the up arrow icon. However calling this leaves large space left of the home button. I am working on sdk 16, so I cannot dynamically set the homeAsUp indicator using
getActionBar().setHomeAsUpIndicator
Some one know a better solution to do this?

Setting Navigation Icon on Android ActionBar

So I'm working on adding ActionBarSherlock and the Navigation Drawer to a project that previously implemented a custom (very poorly written) "action bar". Instead of using fragments and a backstack of activities for navigation, some activities show and hide different layouts. (That is, suppose I am in a list mode and then select a button to go into an edit screen. The app currently hides the list layout and shows another layout.).
So I've added actionbar sherlock and a navigation drawer to all the activities. I want to be able to programmatically switch the navigation icon from the 3 lines to the arrow when certain buttons are pressed.
I can't figure out how to do this though. Any ideas?
Thanks!

The solution to this problem is to use the method:
setDrawerIndicatorEnabled(boolean enable)
inside the ActionBarDrawerToggle class.

After:
drawer.setDrawerListener(toggle);
Use this code:
getSupportActionBar().setDisplayHomeAsUpEnabled(true);
getSupportActionBar().setHomeButtonEnabled(true);
getSupportActionBar().setHomeAsUpIndicator(R.drawable.select);

It depends how wedded you are to built-in actionbar artifacts. You can always redraw the current actionbar by inflating a layout of your choosing, then calling
getSherlockActivity().getSupportActionBar().setDisplayShowTitleEnabled(false);
getSherlockActivity().getSupportActionBar().setDisplayShowHomeEnabled(false);
getSherlockActivity().getSupportActionBar().setDisplayShowCustomEnabled(true);
// Inflate and do whatever you need to your view...
getSherlockActivity().getSupportActionBar().setCustomView(abView);
getSherlockActivity().getSupportActionBar().show();
When you want to go back to your standard (assuming you're using a DrawerLayout to do your navigation drawer), you can just set make a call to setDisplayShowCustomEnabled(false) (re-enable showHome and showTitle as you please).

As far as I know, customization of the back button can only be done via themes. Besides, swapping the drawer icon for the back icon (within the same Activity) doesn't make sense, since users would still be able to access the navigation drawer by sliding the left most edge to the right. It just wouldn't make sense.
If you absolutely need the back icon, then it would make the most sense to make that screen a new Activity since you would indeed be adding another "level" to the stack, which is what the back icon represents.

Benefits of native ActionBar vs custom implementation?

I would like to try and use the native Google ActionBar class for my application however, I would like to be able to change the left most image dynamically, disable the icon and center the title. I was wondering if this is possible of if I should implement my own ActionBar?
My reason for wanting to change the left most image (IE the navigation drawer indicator) is because I am using the navigation drawer but on some screens would like to display the up indicator instead.

Looking through the documentation for the ActionBarDrawerToggle, there is a method to enable/disable the navigation drawer icon (setDrawerIndicatorEnabled), when disabled it reverts to the home-as-up indicator.
Another option is to recreate the drawer in those specific screens you want the icon different and specify the new icon in the creation of the drawer, not sure if this would work though.
http://developer.android.com/reference/android/support/v4/app/ActionBarDrawerToggle.html

Here is the android guide which explains how to do this, but allow me to give a brief overview.
You do not have to have the app icon as the leftmost icon so in certain pages you can disable it by specifying another "android:logo" item in the XML file, or by simply diabling it entirely.
The android logo, which is what you are talking about as the "leftmost item", can have an onClickListener() set for it which is how you can change it simply to an uparrow image which you can download from google.

Custom home button on ActionBar

I am using ActionBar Sherlock library. So, to change the default home button. I did this:
<style name="Theme.mTheme" parent="android:Theme.Sherlock.Light.DarkActionBar">
<item name="android:homeAsUpIndicator">#drawable/custom_home</item>
</style>
which didn't work
So, i added this too:
<item name="homeAsUpIndicator">#drawable/custom_home</item>
now its working. I am having this custom home icon/button on every ActionBar. But in 1 of my Activities i have this in code:
actionBar.setIcon(R.drawable.options_holo_dark);
When i am in that Activity, I can see the icon which i set programatically ie.., options_holo_dark. The 1 which i set in Theme ie.., custom_home is not visible. But the Icon has moved to the Right as if its giving space on the left to the icon i set in theme(though not visible).
This is what i am getting now:
So, how can i avoid that empty space on the left side of the Home Icon?
Thank You

Theme item android:homeAsUpIndicator (and homeAsUpIndicator for ActionBarSherlock) sets drawable for the up icon - that's the little arrow pointing to left that is displayed next to the app icon when you have called setDisplayHomeAsUpEnabled(true) on the action bar.
The size of the up drawable defines the left margin for the app icon (logo). By default its dimensions are 16dp x 16dp. If you put there wider drawable the gap between edge of the screen and the app icon would be wider even though the up icon is not displayed at the moment.
If you want to change the app icon (logo). Use setLogo(int) or setLogo(Drawable) method of ActionBar. Don't forget to call setDisplayUseLogoEnabled(true) too - this method toggles between displaying app icon and custom logo. Also you can define the logo in manifest in attribute android:logo of <application> and <activity> tags and set in theme that you want to use logo instead of app icon in the action bar.