Google is telling Android developers to stop using the Menu button when building apps and move to the Action Bar, which was introduced with Android 3.0 Honeycomb.
Google
is telling Android developers to stop using its Menu button and begin using the
Action Bar that was introduced with the Android 3.0 Honeycomb release.
Scott
Main, lead tech writer for
developer.android.com, penned a
Jan. 26 blog post titled
"Say
Goodbye to the menu Button" to help wean developers off the Menu
button. Cutting right to the point, Main said, "Not only should your apps
stop relying on the hardware Menu button, but you should stop thinking about
your activities using a 'menu button' at all."
Main
said before Honeycomb, all Android-powered devices included a dedicated Menu
button. "As a developer, you could use the Menu button to display whatever
options were relevant to the user, often using the activity's built-in options
menu," he said.
However,
"Honeycomb removed the reliance on physical buttons, and introduced the
Action
Bar class as the standard solution to make actions from the user options
immediately visible and quick to invoke," Main said. "In order to
provide the most intuitive and consistent user experience in your apps, you
should migrate your designs away from using the Menu button and toward using
the action bar. This isn't a new concept-the action bar pattern has been around
on Android even before Honeycomb-but as Ice Cream Sandwich rolls out to more devices,
it's important that you begin to migrate your designs to the action bar in
order to promote a consistent Android user experience."
Main
said developers needn't be concerned that it will take a lot of work to begin
using the Action Bar because of the need to support versions of Android older
than Honeycomb. "It's quite simple for most apps because you can continue
to support the Menu button on pre-Honeycomb devices, but also provide the
action bar on newer devices with only a few lines of code changes," he
said.
Summarizing
his post, Main added:
If
I had to put this whole post into one sentence, it'd be: Set targetSdkVersion
to 14 and, if you use the options menu, surface a few actions in the action bar
with showAsAction="ifRoom".
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