Theme.Holo doesn't show Tabhost Widget icons

Question

I'm using Theme.Holo as my parent theme for an application. However, the tabs in the tab host don't display icons. In order to display icons, I can change the theme to Theme.Light or just Theme, but then I won't have the action bar that comes with Theme.Holo.

Could someone please tell me how I could display icons on the tab host when using Theme.Holo? I'm referring to the iOS-like tab bar icons.

Answer 1

It seems like iconed tabs are not used anymore.

You can use a great library I use for tabs (ViewPagerExtentions) which lets you swipe between tabs, and to set icon for every tab, like below:

You need to download the library. In the example project the layout you want is: activity_fixed_icon_tabs.xml. It is quite straight forward but if you need any help you can ask me.

If you don't want to get your hands dirty, there is a solution for your problem, provided Here. Basically you can get to the ImageView inside the tab and call img.setVisibillity(View.VISIBLE).

Then he says that in android<3.0 it messes up the tab, but he provides a solution for this also. You can check which android version the device runs, and then do accordingly. But as I understand, it won't be a problem for you because you want to use the ActionBar always.

I recommend you to use the ViewPagerExtentions library because it also adds swipe functionallity which is very fancy. But even if you don't want to use this, you have a solution.

Answer 2

Dont know if this solves your problem, but if you remove the text, the icon will be displayed.

This is the code I use:

TabHost tabHost = getTabHost();
Intent intent = new Intent().setClass(this, Overview.class);

spec = tabHost.newTabSpec("overview")
           .setIndicator(Build.VERSION.SDK_INT < 11 ? this.getString(R.string.descr) : "", res.getDrawable(R.drawable.tab_overview))
           .setContent(intent);