Being fortunate enough to live in the land of the Galaxy Nexus Launch, I can speak to some of this. The GN has three places it will put a soft menu button, none of which are represented in the 4.0 emulator, unfortunately. Presumably, because it doesn't have some build flag set to say "there's no hardware Menu button".
If your app has targetSdkVersion of 10 or lower, it will have no native ActionBar, and the menu overflow button will appear alongside the other "device buttons" at the bottom of the screen (or the left edge, in landscape). The emulator doesn't show this "device button" area at all, but you've probably seen it in GN screenshots. If your app has targetSdkVersion of 11 or higher, it probably has an ActionBar, and the GN will put any overflow menu button at the right edge of the ActionBar, same as in Honeycomb. It's a different icon, but the same behavior. This doesn't happen in the ICS emulator, at least not at handset sizes. If your app has targetSdkVersion of 11 or higher, and you use the new split ActionBar ( http://developer.android.com/guide/topics/ui/actionbar.html#SplitBar), the GN will put your overflow menu in the lower ActionBar. Again, just be aware that the emulator does not show this. I've also had some trouble with the formatting of this lower ActionBar on the GN, but I can't seem to repro it at the moment. A consequence of these formatting differences is that you can't tell from the emulator exactly how the ActionBar will handle MenuItems that include showAsAction="ifRoom". Because the emulator's ActionBar doesn't show the soft menu button, it naturally has more room for one more ActionItem than the GN does. Take this into account when trying to plan how many ActionItems your user will be able to see. You may have also noticed on the emulator that ICS doesn't do a very good job of deciding "ifRoom" on the ActionBar. In particular, it'll happily ellipsize the activity's title in order to show one more ActionItem. This behavior also occurs on the GN; it's annoying, and IMHO makes a mockery of "ifRoom". Finally, one problematic edge case occurred for me in an app I had where I hid the title bar in devices smaller than size Large. In this situation, the GN gave no way to access the functionality I had under the Menu key on other handsets: no action bar, but no soft menu button in the device area either. Not nice. But probably not a case which affects many apps. Hope this helps some folks, String -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Android Developers" group. To post to this group, send email to android-developers@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to android-developers+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/android-developers?hl=en
