Since you guys loved part one of my favorite Material Design apps, I’m here to deliver the part two with five fresh new apps that incorporate the new Material Design UI.
Google Calendar
So jumping right into it, the first app worth checking out with Material Design is the new Google Calendar app. If you remembered my last video, I talked about the Today Calendar app but in this video, this one is by Google. And in every possible way, it defines the new Material Design; which makes sense because it’s created by Google so you’d think they know what a calendar app with Material Design should look like.
But as you can see, there’s a slide-in menu from the left where you can toggle events on and off along with birthdates and holidays. There’s a slide down menu where you can open up the month and swipe through each month and there’s also detailed info for each day of the week down below that. And it just all flows together very well. It’s going to definitely take some time to get used to how everything flows together but aesthetically, it just looks really good.
Piktures
The next app that demonstrates Material Design is called Piktures (with a K). It’s basically a very good-looking, clean gallery app outfitted with Material Design. You can view all your pictures outfitted with Material Design. You can view all your pictures right when you boot it up like so. You can swipe in from the left to view the different albums or sections of your gallery, like your Camera and Downloads sections. What’s also cool is that when you tap on the calendar icon on the top right hand corner, you’re presented with a very nice-looking calendar that actually pairs your pictures up with the day of the month you captured it. And just overall, the app is very minimal and it looks great, definitely worth checking out if you’re on a need for a new gallery app.
PushBullet
PushBullet also got updated to the new Material Design recently. If you guys don’t know what PushBullet is, it's basically an app that lets you send info from your PC to your various devices with just a push of a button. You can also send texts from your computer with this app so that’s pretty cool. But it’s also besides the point because this app takes advantage of Material Design. There are menus that swipe in from the left and from the right. If I wanted to share a push, I can tap on the share icon and the option will appear below the screen for me to swipe up. I can also add a bullet by tapping on the plus button on the bottom right, which seems to be the defaulted Material Design method of inputting information. But it’s very fluid and nice to look at.
Battery Widget Reborn
The next app is a very useful one that you should definitely check out if you guys haven’t already. It’s called Battery Widget Reborn and it was recently updated with the new Material Design. First of all with this app, you can see that when you swipe in from the left, the menu icon on the upper left hand corner morphs into an arrow similar to the Play Store and its menus. When you tap on a specific category like battery history, you can see all the Material Design switches that are nice and colored. They even slide around very smoothly when pressed. Even all the menus and icons used to inform you about the Wi-Fi and Bluetooth and things of that nature, they’re all stock images so you definitely have consistency with this app.
Wally
The last app worth checking out is called Wally and it’s one of my favorite apps for finding a good-looking wallpaper. With this app, you don’t have any menus that swipe in from the left or right. Instead, you actually have several different categories you can swipe around in just by swiping left to right anywhere on the screen.
Some neat aesthetics you’ll notice include the Search bar. When you tap on the Search bar, the keyboard scrolls up from the bottom. There’s no virtually weird stuttering or lag like you would usually see when you have to type in info on other phones. Also, when you refresh the page, you will see a neat little animation that morphs over the entire area of content for like a second or two. And it just looks really nice and sort of reflects the animation heavy Material Design theme of Android Lollipop.
With that last one, those are five more of my favorite Material Design apps. I try to find apps that were good apps that also reflect Material Design and not just Material Design apps. Hopefully, you’ll find some of them to be useful.