Stephen Cleary StephenCleary

How to create custom button styles using Android's AppCompat-v7:21

Introduction

AppCompat is an Android support library to provide backwards-compatible functionality for Material design patterns. It currently comes bundled with a set of styles in the Theme.AppCompat and Widget.AppCompat namespaces. However, there is a critical component missing which I would have thought essential to provide the a default from which we could inherit our styles: Widget.AppCompat.Button. Sure, there's Widget.AppCompat.Light.ActionButton, but that doesn't actually inherit from Widget.ActionButton, which does not inherit from Widget.Button, so we might get some unexpected behavior using that as our base button style, mainly because Widget.ActionButton strictly belongs in the ActionBar.

So, if we want to have a decently normal default button style related to AppCompat, we need to make it ourselves. Let's start by digging into the Android SDK to see how it's doing default styles.

Digging In

	using System;
	using System.Reactive.Linq;
	using System.Threading;

	/// <summary>
	/// Helper methods for using observable <see cref="IProgress{T}"/> implementations. These are hot observables.
	/// </summary>
	public static class ObservableProgress
	{
	/// <summary>