Since Android 3.0 (a.k.a. “Honeycomb”) the ActionBar has been the workhorse of “standard” Android user interfaces. The nice folks over at ActionBarSherlock.com have also created a set of classes and resources that allow you to build ActionBar-based UI’s all the way back to Android 2.0 (“Eclair”).
Unfortunately, customizing the look of the ActionBar is not, in my opinion, incredibly well documented. In addition, it’s a bit complex, because the ActionBar can be displayed in a variety of different ways depending on what options you select in your app and the size of the screen. This is the first in a series of posts that attempts to provide some detail on the various theming options that are available, and how to take advantage of them.
This post will focus on providing style for tabs in the ActionBar. Thus, without further ado, we present The World’s Ugliest Android Application, since the colors were chosen to illustrate concepts, not to be visually pleasing.