LegacyBar: Your MonoDroid ActionBar

Android is kind of a beast, interesting and complex. One of my favorite features of Android has to be their implementation of the Actionbar, which they started in ICS 3.0. If you are a native Java programmer using the action bar is great, and if you need to target android 2.X devices there are some great libraries that give you backwards compatibility. If you are like me, a C# developer using Mono for Android then it isn’t that easy.

When I started developing apps I started searching for a Mono action bar tool since I wanted to target 2.2+ devices. That is when I ran across Tomasz Cielecki and his project called MonoDroid.ActionBar. He took time porting over the actionbar to be backward compatible and all in C# for Mono. I soon forked it on GitHub, and started making pull requests. My additions were simple really, a few bug fixes, custom themes, and the overflow menu. Since then we have been working to make it a separate Library that anyone can use.

Today we launched the LegacyBar Sample app on Google Play and soon will be submitting to the Xamarin component library! Check it out and if you have questions open up some issues on git!