In trying to follow the Android Design Guidelines, I'm running into a small quandary.
I want to have a list of items that I can long-press several of (multi-select), and then perform bulk actions on them.
The Design Guidelines suggest using the Contextual Action Bar for this, and it sounds perfectly like what I had in mind. Problem is, I'm trying to maintain compatibility backwards to API 7 (due to my phone being 2.3.3 currently).
I'm using ActionBarSherlock to get other actionbar stuff, but I can't seem to figure out how to get it to either fire up a contextual action bar, nor have I figured out how to add buttons arbitrarily to the ActionBar in ABS. I see you can do tabs, so maybe that's the answer, but since I'm trying to allow multi-select, I don't want to have the normal modal context menu.
Setting up contextual actionbar is the same to setting up the 'regular' ActionBar items as far as the XML is concerned. This example in the developer's guide explains it all.
In order to use ActionBarSherlock, replace the default Android-callbacks to the ActionBarSherlock-edited callbacks (e.g. instead of Android.View.ActionMode, use com.actionbarsherlock.view.ActionMode).