customization - Android: customize application's menu (e.g background color)

Question

What is the way (if there is a way) to customize the menu (the one triggered by the MENU button of the phone). I'm especially interested in two things:

• changing the background color from the standard light gray into a darker gray
• how the menu items are aligned. I have 4 items and they are automatically aligned 2x2, but I would prefer to have them all in one line (1x4)

Answer 1

I created my own menu class. It maybe isn't exactly what you want but it should hopefully get you started. Here is the article I published and a downloadable link to the source code.

http://www.codeproject.com/KB/android/AndroidMenusMyWay.aspx