Bundled Notes has made a name for itself as a sleek to-do and note-taking app that is quick to adopt new design paradigms. It was among the first third-party apps to get Material You support on Android, and now it might be the very first service to bring Material You themes to the web, even ahead of Google. As announced on Twitter, the web app can now be themed to your liking using a color picker, applying Material You-like themes onto the whole website.
Of course, the appeal of dynamic Material You theming usually is its hands-off approach that doesn’t require you to do anything but set a wallpaper, but since your browser (currently) doesn’t know which wallpaper you’ve set, this is the second best thing we can currently get.
By default, the Bundled Notes web app now comes in a monochrome gray and white look. With the new theme and fonts setting at the top of the app, you can change the design to resemble your phone’s or your desktop computer’s theme as you wish. A Material You toggle lets you bring up a standard color picker, and you can also select your preference when it comes to the font and the dark and light themes.
While you need to sign up and subscribe to use the web app (all done via the Android app), you can play with the theming engine without giving out any of your data. Just visit the Bundled Notes website and click the color picker icon, and you can explore the website in different colors. Since the web app is responsive and adjusts to your screen size, you can also give it a try on your phone.
As for the technical background, Bundled Notes developer Xavier Tobin told us that he used the Material color utilities that are part of Google's Material Foundation on Github. He explained that these utilities offer a few other capacities like the option to extract colors from images, much like how Material You works on Android. It wouldn't be surprising if Google was looking into a way to bring this capability to Chrome, whether on Chromebooks only or on other platforms, too.
With Google offering these tools to third-party developers, it's clear that the company has high hopes for its design language, and we would guess that at some point in the future, we will be able
Other than the Material You interface tweak, not too much has changed on the surface with this Bundled Notes update apart from behind-the-scene improvements. Bigger improvements are supposed to come later down the road, though.
While Google doesn’t support wallpaper-based Material You theming on the web, it is in the process of updating its web apps with other Material You elements like buttons, forms, and shapes. It’s currently rolling out a small redesign to the new Gmail experience on the web with these small refinements, all without the option to pick any color as your preferred scheme just yet (disregarding the long-existing themes you can set up in Gmail’s settings, which aren't that granular).
Material You has brought a breath of fresh air to Android, at least when we’re only looking at Google apps and some third-party developers that were eager enough to implement it already. Google’s new dynamic design language with its individualized themes hasn’t made the jump to any other platform yet, even if Google is hard at work bringing it to Chromebooks, so we might soon get more hands-off versions of these kind of web app themes.