Categories
Android

How to display an icon in the preferences

In the Android preferences you can put different types of controls: check box, edit box, list,…, but none of these displays an icon (see Settings).
Usually a preference consists of two lines, the title and the summary, and after you have clicked you get a dialog box where you can select the chosen item, as you can see in the two pictures below.

Categories
Android

Spinner menu

The spinner menu is a navigation mode that allows you to switch from one view to another using a drop down menu.
The advantage of using the spinner menu consists in a more compact design because it does not require a dedicated tab bar, but it uses the bar already commonly used for the title and the logo of the application.
According to the Google guidelines for action bar the spinner menu should be used to show different views that show the same data but arranged and filtered in a different way (calendar by day, week or month) or that show the same data type (for example, the contents of multiple accounts).