Wednesday, November 26, 2014

Random Contact with Material Design Love

It's been a while since my last blog post, I was obviously busy with my job, life and other important things. In between Android released the latest SDK and support libraries for taking material design to lower versions.

I have been slowly looking at the latest APIs and how to use them in my spare time. Once I was able to get hold of the latest SDK as well as Android Studio, I started to see how I could redesign some apps based on material design principles.

Random Contact 2.2
After doing a sample project that made use of all the new features, I started working on redesigning Random Contact app. Firstly this is a simple app, not too complicated in terms of features as well as low volume of users. Second of all, this app has not been updated in a long while. So a little love was on the cards.

Take a look at the new design below.
It will be interesting to note that the action bar and some text color change dynamically based on your contact's profile image. This is made possible due to a library called Palette which is part of Android. On a technical side, this app uses the following new features from Android.

  • Recycler View
  • Toolbar
  • Card View
  • Palette
This app represents a fresh UI design with material design principles in mind. You can find the app at the link below. Try it and let me know your feedback.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.ae.apps.randomcontact

The source code for the app is available at github - https://github.com/midhunhk/random-contact