Question

I have an app that in a certain Activity (drawing) can be in any one of a number of states, such as draw, erase, select, etc.

To enable these states, I’ve got a button for each in the ActionBar, but one thing I’d like to do is to ‘show’ the user which state is enabled by keeping the button pressed active or pressed until I turn it off (when they have switched state by pressing one of the other buttons).

Searches here and other places have me coming up blank… can anyone recommend a possible solution? I’ve though about rolling my own toolbar, and while this might be my final solution, using the ActionBar would speed things up greatly at this point.

Thanks.

Answer 1

There is no direct way to do that, as far as I know, but you could implement your custom component to do that. However, my advice to you is having a separate toolbar that’s not on the action bar, since the users expect all buttons on the Action Bar to be “Action Items” which perform something immediate, so having toggle items on the Action Bar might break this expectation. This allows you to save space on the action bar for things that the user expects to see there like: navigation, “Undo”, “Save”, “Delete”…