Question

I have an application where I have 5 tabs set up, and I it works perfectly except for one issue I noticed recently. On large screen sizes, for some reason, the tabs are transparent, I only noticed this when I tried out the application on one of my colleagues large android device. So I then set up the emulator to a large screen size of 10 inches, and its the same thing.

So in order to fix this, I used this code

    public static void setTabColor(TabHost tabhost) {
    for (int i = 0; i < tabhost.getTabWidget().getChildCount(); i++) {
        tabhost.getTabWidget().getChildAt(i)
                .setBackgroundColor(Color.parseColor("#292929")); // unselected
                                                                    // }
        tabhost.getTabWidget().getChildAt(tabhost.getCurrentTab())
                .setBackgroundColor(Color.parseColor("#8b8b8b")); // selected
    }
}

Then I use OnTabChangeListener and place

setTabColor(tabHost);

under each tab change. This fixed the issue so that the tab colours are the same for all screen sizes. However the problem now is that the divider is gone. I tried using

tabHost.getTabWidget().setDividerDrawable(R.drawable.separator);

but the problem is this piece of code must be called before you set the content of the tabs and seeing I have set up

setTabColor(tabHost);

on every tab change, it makes it rather useless as it works when application loads up, but when you switch tab, it is gone again, and I can’t call it again otherwise application will crash.

Does anyone have any suggestions as to how I can fix this issue? And also could someone explain to me why the tabs are transparent on larger screens? Why does Android do this?

Thanks in advance for any assistance

Answer 1

I fixed this issue, turns out I could just color the tabs in and did not need to use the tab divider after all. Used this method here

    public static void setTabColor(TabHost tabhost) {
    for (int i = 0; i < tabhost.getTabWidget().getChildCount(); i++) {
        tabhost.getTabWidget().getChildAt(i)
                .setBackgroundColor(Color.parseColor("#292929")); // unselected
                                                                    // }
        tabhost.getTabWidget().getChildAt(tabhost.getCurrentTab())
                .setBackgroundColor(Color.parseColor("#8b8b8b")); // selected
    }
}

To color in tabs