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System Bar and Action Bar

posted Feb 11, 2011, 9:19 PM by Tor Norbye   [ updated Feb 15, 2011, 11:55 AM by Xavier Ducrohet ]
The layout editor now supports previewing the various "operating system" bars that are included when you run your layouts on actual devices or emulators. This gives you a better sense of how much screen real estate is available for the targeted screen type.

The set of bars shown depends on a variety of factors. Here's a typical phone screen:


You can see the notifications bar on the top with sample wifi and battery icons, followed by a title bar (which lists your application name), followed by the actual layout which in this case is a simple label.

You can switch your layout to the "NoTitleBar" theme, and in that case the title bar is omitted:


In Honeycomb there is a new ActionBar, and some themes can include it:


Finally, for tablet sizes, you get the navigation buttons on the bottom as well:

(This requires Android 3.0 as the render target, though the plan is to backport this and related changes to the rendering libraries for 2.x).
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