>From my personal experience with the Action Bar on Honeycomb and ICS I am not really convinced that the Action Bar is a "clear win". Again and again I wondered what an icon in an app's Action Bar meant. And just recently I pressed the wrong icon in the email app and never found that mail again, just because I was not sure which of the icons was meant to mark the email as unread again. With a normal menu there is usually (or always?) an item description that the user can read alongside an icon for quickly recognizing the functionality. So if a user is unsure what the icon in the menu means he can always read the menu item text. An Action Bar does not have this possibility. If the user does not get what the icon means then he has no means of finding it out. For me that is a very bad user experience.
I fully understand that the menu button has its problems. I also had emails from users which missed functionality in my apps which was clearly accessible had they only ever clicked on the menu button. So I agree that a menu button alone is not sufficient since a part of the users never uses it. What I would have preferred, instead of moving completely away from the menu to the Action Bar, is offering both, i.e. have an Action Bar so that users can see the app options on the screen _and_ a menu where he can match icons to a brief description of what the icon means and a simple way to access more app options than visible with the few icons in the Action Bar. That's what I would have liked to see as a user. And this way I have implemented it in my apps, using a normal menu and a hand-crafted kind of Action Bar. Just my 2 cents On 3 Feb., 19:32, JP <[email protected]> wrote: > Action bar to me is a clear win and I feel was worth the little effort > it took to get it done. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Android Discuss" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/android-discuss?hl=en.
