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

Redesigning the Message Counter App

With the developer release of Android L in June and the introduction of Material design, I've been thinking of redesigning the Message Counter app. Taking into account various principles mentioned and how they can be applied to this app, a few initial design thoughts are shared here.

Variations on the color scheme are given below.

So first impressions and suggestions will be very much helpful.

You can find the current Message Counter app here: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.ae.apps.messagecounter

Material Design Wallpapers

So Google made the Android L developer preview last week. In a couple of screenshots, they had shown images based on material design and I thought they would look cool as wallpapers. So I created a couple of artworks based on them. You are free to use them as wallpapers or in other creative ways.

Up above you can see my current home screen, you may be able to spot a widget for MessageCounter which is in development as well. So without any wait, here are 2 images. Click on them for a full screen version and download to use them as you like.

The following images are licensed under Creative Commons license. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/. You are free to use these images subject to the terms of this license.


Material design Wallpapers by midhunhk is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Update: One more artwork is here. This one is my current wallpaper.

Watch out for more updates.

Update 2: The complete wallpapers and as well as future updates can be found at :  https://plus.google.com/photos/114665288998361746888/albums/6121148941176472961

RoundedImageView in Android

The contact picture as it appears in Google+ inside a circle was part of the redesigned Random Contact app at the play store.

The solution was to create a custom View "RoundedImageView". Developed with help from stackoverlow.com, the custom view is released as an open source component that anyone can reuse.

RoundedImageView usd in Random Contact app

The RoundedImageView extends android.widget.ImageView and basically applies a circular mask over the image by overriding the onDraw() method.

This file is a part of the ae-apps-library project.

Source for RoundedImageView at https://github.com/midhunhk/ae-apps-library/blob/master/library/AeAppsLibrary/src/com/ae/apps/common/views/RoundedImageView.java

PNR Status App

Finally the PNR Status App for Android was released on the Google Play Store a few weeks back. The latest version is 3.2 codenamed Marvin.

Don't worry about keeping track of your PNR Number or enter it each time you want to check the status. Use this app to store your PNR Number and check the status easily.
You can see a sorted list of ticket message details sent as confirmation for easily accessing your booking information.

Features:
- Follows Android Design principles
- High quality graphics and icon
- Multiple services to choose from
- Detailed PNR information
- Shows ticket information from IRCTC's SMS
- No Advertisments
- Free
- Open Source

Screenshots

 

Did I mention that this app is designed for tablets as well?

On a 7 Inch Tablet

This application is open source and free to use. The source code can be found at the following GitHub location. https://github.com/midhunhk/pnrstatusapp . Feel free to browse and

Find out more app details from https://www.facebook.com/AeAppLabs
Play Store Link: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.ae.apps.pnrstatus.v3