Develop Reference

How to create a menu without a bar?

I have an application without an appbar. Now I want to put 3 Buttons into a menu. I have seen the option to create a toolbar and then add the items programmaticlly. But first I would prefer not to have a bar but just the menu.
I know that that isn´t really important because I can make the bar transparent.
And Second I really don´t want to add the items programmatically. (But defigned in xml.) Is this possible, are there better ways and how can I do it?

If "By the menu" you mean, the overflow menu that exists in the app bar then you can not just the add the menu that way. The app bar or toolbar has to be there to contain that overflow menu. But for giving that sort of effect as you also mentioned you can have the toolbar transparent or you can look into the PopUpMenu, http://developer.android.com/guide/topics/ui/menus.html,
this way you can hide your app bar and can give a separate button which will call PopUpMenu, its going to give you same overflow menu effect.
Regarding your 2nd requirement of putting menu in xml, if i am getting it correct you can have your menu defined like this,
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<menu xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android" >
<item
android:id="#+id/phone"
android:title="#string/phone"
android:icon="#drawable/phone"
android:showAsAction="ifRoom|withText"
/>
<item
android:id="#+id/computer"
android:title="#string/computer"
android:icon="#drawable/computer"
android:showAsAction="ifRoom|withText"
/>
</menu>

You need your CSS anymets revised.
Please consider this codings:
style {template.css}
I think you'll find those are the exact answer.

Text or Icon in action bar, stuck with the 3 dots

I'm making an android app in Eclipse. I want to place a text or icon in the action bar, but when I am writing in menu.xml, which looks like this:
<menu xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android" >
<item
android:id="#+id/createnew"
android:orderInCategory="1"
android:showAsAction="ifRoom"
android:title="CREATE"/>
</menu>
it puts it in the options menu. I want to separate it.
I see this in the app when I run it:
(sorry can't post pictures because I don't have enough rep)
I want to CREATE next to the option menu like this for example:

Since you are using the AppCompat Actionbar, you need to use a custom namespaced showAsAction attribute.
It should look something like this:
<menu xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android"
xmlns:yourapp="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res-auto" >
<item
android:id="#+id/createnew"
android:orderInCategory="1"
yourapp:showAsAction="ifRoom"
android:title="CREATE"/>
</menu>
Note that this uses yourapp:showAsAction instead of android:showAsAction. This is because the showAsAction attribute is not available on pre-Honeycomb devices and is provided by the support library.
For more information, read the Action Bar developer guide.

It's caused by this line
android:showAsAction="ifRoom"
That tells Android to put it up there if it's going to fit nicely. If you want it up there no matter the fit use
android:showAsAction="always"

ActionBarSherlock collapseActionView

I'm having a problem when I try to set one item in my actionbar as always visible and 4 more icons as dropdown items with the following layout:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<menu xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android" >
<item
android:id="#+id/search_movies"
android:icon="#drawable/action_search"
android:showAsAction="always"
android:title="Search"/>
<item
android:id="#+id/movies"
android:icon="#drawable/action_video"
android:showAsAction="collapseActionView"
android:title="Movies"/>
<item
android:id="#+id/theaters"
android:icon="#drawable/action_location_map"
android:showAsAction="collapseActionView"
android:title="Theaters"/>
<item
android:id="#+id/preferences"
android:icon="#drawable/action_settings"
android:showAsAction="collapseActionView"
android:title="Preferences"/>
<item
android:id="#+id/contact"
android:icon="#drawable/action_about"
android:showAsAction="collapseActionView"
android:title="Contact"/>
</menu>
The result is just the first item showing and the rest are not visible, not even as a dropdown. This is using ActionBarSherlock and a 2.3 Android device.
The question is, how can I get the icons to follow this layout:
EDIT:
The problem I had was because when you are using the actionbar with a device that has a "menu" hardware button the 3-dot dropdown does not shows off, the 4 other items are only displayed if you press the menu hardware button. Does anyone knows if this behaviour can be modified?

Hmmm, maybe I misunderstood, but if you wish to places those remaining four items into the overflow action menu (the 3-dot icon) then using android:showAsAction="never" instead of "collapseActionView" should do it.
...Tried a couple ways, but this did the trick:
Force overflow menu in ABS

I've met the same problem and my solution is quite simple. (I didn't use HoloEverywhere.)
The idea comes from the ABS sample project, whose drop-down menu can be displayed on pre-4.0 devices as well by using a submenu. So, my idea is using a submenu to disguise the 3-dot icon. Here's the code:
#Override
public boolean onCreateOptionsMenu(Menu menu) {
SubMenu sub = menu.addSubMenu("More");
sub.getItem().setShowAsAction(MenuItem.SHOW_AS_ACTION_ALWAYS);
sub.getItem().setIcon(R.drawable.ic_menu);
getSupportMenuInflater().inflate(R.menu.activity_main, sub);
return true;
}
Since the "More" menu doesn't have a MenuItem.SHOW_AS_ACTION_WITH_TEXT attribute, so the word "More"(or whatever you named) will actually not be displayed on the action bar. The only displayed icon R.drawable.ic_menu can be copied from ABS source code res/drawable-xxdpi folders named "abs__ic_menu_moreoverflow_normal_holo_dark.png", which is the so-called 3-dot icon. And the R.menu.activity_main is your menu xml.
It works!

Android: Margin between ActionBar icon and Navigation dropdown menu changes when you click search

I have the following setup:
So you can click on the search icon for the action bar to turn into a search bar. Pretty standard:
So if you're done searching you can click the Home icon to make the bar go away:
But when you go back, the navigation dropdown menu is shifted to the right quite a bit:
I can't really figure out what is happening here. The first thing I did was make a brand new app and recreate it (which is what you see below) to make sure it wasn't an issue with styles or themes I'm using in my main app. That didn't help the problem. I'm using ActionBarSherlock, so the next thing I did was rebuild the project using Google's official Action Bar API. That didn't make a difference either.
Does anyone have any ideas? I'll provide any code you guys think could help, but I took the implementation pretty much straight from Google's docs about it. Thanks!
EDIT: Adding some before-after images with layout borders visible (dev options feature in 4.1+)
BEFORE:
AFTER:
I've also included the menu XML:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<item android:id="#+id/abm_search"
android:icon="#android:drawable/ic_menu_search"
android:showAsAction="always|collapseActionView"
android:actionViewClass="android.widget.SearchView" />
<item android:id="#+id/abm_location"
android:title="Stuff"
android:showAsAction="never" />
<item android:id="#+id/abm_radius"
android:title="More Stuff"
android:showAsAction="never" />
<item android:id="#+id/abm_settings"
android:title="Other Stuff"
android:showAsAction="never"/>

Found out the problem. I had given the action bar a title of "". Instead, if you gave the action bar this display option:
actionBar.setDisplayOptions(ActionBar.DISPLAY_SHOW_HOME);
it fixed the problem. Hope this helps someone else.

Have the split ActionBar display twice as many icons

I'd like to have an app layout as the one they used for Gmail. They have the actionbar that has icons (on my device it has the app logo for up navigation, and a custom view for selecting priority inbox/inbox/etc), but there is also some kind of split ActionBar because at the bottom I have several icons (compose, search, labels, etc).
How could I do this? I have implemented the following ActionBar through this XML:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<menu xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android" >
<item
android:id="#+id/menu_gps"
android:icon="#drawable/icone_gps_continu"
android:showAsAction="always"
android:title="#string/menu_gps"/>
<item
android:id="#+id/menu_sort"
android:icon="#drawable/icone_liste_chron"
android:showAsAction="always"
android:title="#string/menu_liste"/>
<item
android:id="#+id/menu_stats"
android:icon="#drawable/icone_statistiques"
android:showAsAction="always"
android:title="#string/menu_stats"/>
<item
android:id="#+id/menu_save"
android:icon="#drawable/icone_terminersortie"
android:showAsAction="always"
android:title="#string/menu_save"/>
<item
android:id="#+id/menu_search"
android:icon="#drawable/ic_launcher"
android:showAsAction="always"
android:title="#string/menu_search"/>
<item
android:id="#+id/menu_photo"
android:icon="#drawable/icone_enregistrerphoto"
android:showAsAction="always"
android:title="#string/menu_photo">
</item>
<item
android:id="#+id/menu_sound"
android:icon="#drawable/icone_enregistrerson"
android:showAsAction="always"
android:title="#string/menu_sound">
</item>
<item
android:id="#+id/menu_settings"
android:icon="#drawable/icone_parametres"
android:showAsAction="always"
android:title="#string/menu_settings">
</item>
</menu>
And I have of course enabled the split ActionBar by adding android:uiOptions="splitActionBarWhenNarrow" to my <application> tag in the manifest.
What I get though is an empty "top" ActionBar; and the bottom one is displaying only three icons. I thought I could display like 3-4 icons at the top and 5 at the bottom in portait mode, and all of them at the top in landscape mode.
Note: even if I'm testing on ICS with my Galaxy Nexus, I'm using ActionBarSherlock in order to provide backward compatibility.

Looks like I posted too fast, it seems it's not possible.
Duplicates:
How to Place ActionBar Items in Main ActionBar and Bottom Bar
Android Split Action Bar with Action Items on the top and bottom?
Apparently this is not possible. However they did it in gmail/gplus, maybe using a custom view for the bottom part... Still expecting a better answer to this!
Reto Meier's word on this:
I think the problem with splitting the actions between the top and bottom is that it would make it more difficult to perform actions. Actions should be the most important things to do on an Activity -- splitting them between the top and bottom of the screen means users need to look in two places rather than one.

I was also wondering how these apps had icons in both bars, so I decompiled two of them.
What I found is that these two apps didn't implement the ActionBar at all and use custom layouts for both bars. I'm not sure if I can name these apps here, but they are well known apps with 10M+ downloads.
I strongly suggest to go the same way if you don't like the default ActionBar (which have very little room for customization) and create custom layouts instead (not necessary for both bars, it depends on your needs).
It's quite easy to reproduce the split action bar layout. Its height is always 48dp whatever the device is, so a simple LinearLayout or RelativeLayout with a fixed height and some transparent image buttons work very vell. In only 15 minutes you get a fully customizable split action bar.