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With Android 3. Honeycomb, came along the lack of a menu button on devices. In Android four. Ice Cream Sandwich, no hardware button means that developers need not map it in their applications any longer.
Ahead of Honeycomb, the button was utilized for applications to deliver numerous possibilities that have been pertinent to the consumer, utilizing the activity’s constructed-in possibilities menu. Given that the physical buttons were removed in Android three., the ActionBar class came to the stage to make choices quickly visible to the user. Ice Cream Sandwich follows on the exact same tradition, and applications built for the new OS flavor need to have to alter to come in line with the new requirement.
“In order to supply the most intuitive and steady consumer knowledge in your apps, you should migrate your models away from using the Menu button and toward utilizing the action bar,” Scott Principal, lead tech author for developer.android.com, explains. “This isn’t a new notion — the action bar pattern has been about on Android even before Honeycomb — but as Ice Cream Sandwich rolls out to a lot more devices, it is critical that you begin to migrate your models to the action bar in order to market a constant Android consumer expertise.” For developers looking to provide support for gadgets running underneath pre-Honeycomb OS flavors as effectively, issues must be fairly straightforward. They will need to have to add help for the action bar on newer gadgets, although maintaining the Menu button on older ones. Moreover, Scott Main notes that devs ought to “stop contemplating about actions using a ‘menu button’,” in addition to no lengthier relying on the hardware Menu button for their applications. “Even if your app is built to support versions of Android older than 3. (in which apps traditionally use the possibilities menu panel to display user options/actions), when it runs on Android 3. and past, there is no Menu button,” he notes. “The button that seems in the system/navigation bar represents the action overflow for legacy apps, which reveals actions and user possibilities that have ‘overflowed off the screen’.” App builders interested in studying some much more facts on this should have a appear at this post on the Android Developers weblog.
