Icons and MenuItem for Android

I’ve been working through Ed Burnette’s book, “Hello, Andorid” and it’s given me a number of new tricks already; I’m only about a quarter of the way through.  One of the changes I made for my Android game Jumpy was to move the programmatic building of the menu to a menu.xml file instead, as Mr. Burnette describes in Chapter 3 of his book.

One thing that the book does not mention is adding an icon to the menu item.  With a little investigation I found the android:icon element which allows you to point to a drawable.  I went a little further and found Google’s default setting icon by using the drawable “@android:drawable/ic_menu_preferences”.

One of my menu items in the menu.xml file now looks like,

	<item android:id="@+id/settings_menu_item"
		  android:title="@string/settings_menu_label"
		  android:alphabeticShortcut="@string/settings_menu_shortcut"
		  android:icon="@android:drawable/ic_menu_preferences" />

So now my menu item for “Settings” now looks like the following.

With a little more hunting I found the list of MenuItem elements and my new favorite Android API page, the android.R.styleable class.  It’s got a whole bunch of info on all the attributes and element names allowed in the Android XML files, from MenuItem to AndroidManifestPermission, I highly recommend you take a gander at it to learn all sorts of interesting tidbits.

I also recommend Ed Burnette’s book for more info on the menu.xml file and a whole host of other topics for developing Android programs.