Taking advantage of the translucent status bar in Android 4.4 KitKat

Question

When I released my note taking application for Android 4.0 - 4.3 I used a custom action bar color with a custom action bar icon (instead of using the standard light and dark act

Answer 1

You're very close you just need to update your view background colors:

Specifying a global background color in your AppBaseTheme would also work but would likely cause a mess as it would end up been the default background color for everything.