The Android Action Bar Style Generator allows you to easily create a simple, attractive and seamless custom action bar style for your Android application. It will generate all necessary nine patch assets plus associated XML drawables and styles which you can copy straight into your project.
Use it online here: http://jgilfelt.github.com/android-actionbarstylegenerator
Header2ActionBar is a library which implements the fading action bar effect that can be seen in the new Play Music and Google Newspaper apps.
An example of how to extend the ActionBar under the status bar from the theme