The Material fever has struck again and this time it took over the Hootsuite social application. The service, which supports both Twitter and Facebook (along with LinkedIn and Foursquare), has moved from a very Holo design to a more or less Material one that sits quite comfortably on Lollipop devices.
Included are a transparent status bar, a colorized tab bar, a navigation drawer that slides on top of the entire app (but below the status bar), a FAB for quickly posting a new message, and appropriate icons in the drawer. Animations are mysteriously absent, the only effects I saw were when you try to tap a post or when you drop down the account selector while typing.
The update also comes with improved Facebook Pages support, allowing you to create separate streams for your posts, the inbound posts that are shared by others on your page, and unpublished posts. There's also "updated support for Android Wear," though I can't tell what that stands for. All I see is the notification on my G Watch R with the option to dismiss it or block the app, which is what any notification does on Android Wear by default.
Hootsuite still keeps a tight grasp around its application, not allowing any sort of customization for its look and feel (fonts, colors, etc), but I found the default settings acceptable although I would have preferred a larger font. However, I had to remind myself that customization isn't Hootsuite's, uhm, strong suit.
The app targets itself more toward community managers, allowing them to organize their streams and tabs from various social networks (up to 3 are available for free, and you pay to get more) and sync that with the web. That part has been improved in v3.0 of Hootsuite too, thanks to faster synchronization times. Post scheduling, image uploads to multiple networks, push notifications, stats tracking and analytics for shared links, and more are still present in the application.
Below you can first see the entire changelog and then grab the app from the widget to give it a spin.
We’re excited to launch Hootsuite for Android v3.0!
- Shiny new Material design
- Tabs and streams now sync with web
- Launch right into your first stream
- View images full screen to easily save or share them
- Swipe to hide or delete social networks
- Updated support for Android Wear
- And much more!