Translucent system bars and content margin in KitKat

Question

I'm trying to take advantage of the new KitKat translucent system bars, to get a full screen image in the background of my app.

I'm having problems figuring out the right settings to get the behaviour I want. Right now I have a ViewPager with three Fragments each one composed of a RelativeLayout containing an ImageView (for the background image) and a TextView for the content.

What I'm after is to have the content fit fully in the portion of the screen available for interactions, and the image to take the whole visible portion of the screen.

If I just use android:Theme.Holo.Light.NoActionBar.TranslucentDecor as my theme it looks fine in portrait, but the navigation bar overlaps the content in landscape (see the screenshots below).

Following the recommendation in the docs, I added android:fitsSystemWindows = true to my theme, but that generates some weird artifacts (see below)

How can I make it behave like in the second example, but look good, without the visual artifacts?

Answer 1

My solution was to disable translucent navigation in landscape mode. You still get a translucent status bar, but it fixes the issue where the nav bar is opaque and overlaps in landscape.

res/values-v19/styles.xml (these values are in my theme)

<item name="android:windowTranslucentStatus">true</item> <item name="android:windowTranslucentNavigation">@bool/translucentNavBar</item> 

res/values-v19/bools.xml (enable translucent nav)

<bool name="translucentNavBar">true</bool> 

res/values-land-v19/bools.xml (disable translucent nav in landscape)

<bool name="translucentNavBar">false</bool> 

res/values-sw600dp-land-v19/bools.xml (enable translucent nav for tablets in landscape)

<bool name="translucentNavBar">true</bool>