Can you please be more specific about what you are trying to achieve?
It it's about calling different activities depending on API version, the action bar has nothing to do with that. You analyse API version in onOptionsItemSelected and act accordingly.
If you want different menu items depending on API version, just create a folder menu-v11 (or menu-v14) and put version-specific xml-s- there.
BTW, I use com.android.actionbarcompat and it works great for me!