How to implement a menu with more visible items in android?

Question

I'm planning an app to have lots of menu items in landscape mode. However, the menu implementation by android seems to have some limitations causing menu items to hide even with a lot of empty space. According to them, this is because of design principles:

When contained within the action bar there is a finite maximum of action items based on the device's density-independent width. The action items can also not cover more than half the width of the action bar.

Action bar - ifRoom option leaving too much space

Also:

To override this behavior and have more items, it would be necessary to build a toolbar and have as many buttons as the screen would support. However, I will be reinventing the wheel, because the android menu has a lot of integrations with the device menu button, overflow behavior by collapsing, tooltip by pressing, etc...

Still, I researched some apps and I found that Squid (old Papyrus) does exactly what I seek. It displays far more than what android limits to and it seems to be exactly the android menu behavior but allowing more items.

My question is: What the recommendation to achieve this? Is there a way to overcome the android limitation with a few "hacks" or should I build a whole new custom menu to change a minimal configuration? Can I inflate the android menu and place it somewhere else?

Thanks.

Answer 1

I guess what you need in this situation is to use ActionBar custom view, I don't really know if there is any other way to do that but i know a custom view will do the job, and by the way it's very easy.

See the example bellow:

onCreate():

final ActionBar actionBar = getActionBar();
        actionBar.setCustomView(R.layout.custom_view);
        actionBar.setDisplayShowTitleEnabled(false);
        actionBar.setDisplayShowCustomEnabled(true);

Custom View:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<LinearLayout xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android"
    android:layout_width="fill_parent"
    android:layout_height="wrap_content"
    android:orientation="horizontal" >

    <!-- Your Items -->

</LinearLayout>

Hope this will help.