At a high level, I have done several types of progress bar styles, but they are all ugly when I have attempted to make them skinny.
I am looking for a jump start tutorial or layout that will give a bar that looks similar to below image

Any ideas? I will be glad to publish the results when/if I get them working.
There is a property android:maxHeight which does exactly what you need. You should set the android:thumb drawable bigger than the maxHeight to achieve the slick seekbar effect.
For example:
The slider_progress drawable was taken from here and the thumb_img is a bare PNG with a red circle.
Here is what I got: