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Google Blogger gets surprise Material Design update on Android after years of neglect [APK Download]
Blogger used to be the go-to platform for anyone who wanted to share their words and opinions with the internet, but it has long been surpassed by social media on the consumer side and Wordpress and Medium on the more professional side. We assumed that Google would just let the service die slowly by not providing updates to it anymore, but today, a new Android app version has been released on the Play Store after two years of stagnation. The update replaces the Holo interface of old with a modern Material redesign, bringing the product in line with Google's other offers.
Ah Holo, how easily have you been forgotten! No sooner had Material Design been announced that we scrapped your vibrant black and blue, your grey boxes, your app tabs, and started championing white everywhere and animations. It's clear that Holo doesn't want to die, or someone at Google doesn't think Holo should be completely gone from Android, if only because it's good to see where you came from to appreciate the road you've been on. Like keeping that old photo of your acne-filled face or that baggy pair of pants that you used to wear before losing weight. It's great for reminiscing and comparing.
It's 2012 and WebMD, one of the web's leading medical information sources, has decided to get its affairs in order and finally brush up its Android application to implement those cool holo design ideas that Google unveiled back in October 2011. Waiiiiiit. Checks calendar. Refreshes time & date. Checks calendar again. I'll be damned, it's 2015!
We've just received official word from the Googlers on high that the 2012 Nexus 7, albeit burdened with crappy, crappy NAND storage and an aging Tegra 3 processor, will receive Android 5.0 Lollipop as an OTA update. Rejoice.
I've tried a lot of different password managers over the years (and even covered using KeePass and Dropbox to stay in sync on Android as one of my first posts on Android Police – nostalgic!) but switched to LastPass many months ago. I find it to be one of the easiest cross-compatible methods of keeping my passwords in sync across all of my devices. The one downside, however, is that the Android app (and web UI for that matter), is pretty hideous.
As it's getting close to Nexus season, the rumors about Google's next phone are really starting to pile up. As are the leaks. And at this point, it can be really fun to hop on the speculation express to conclusion town. Dare I say, it's understandable. Even "Nexus 5" - a name that has been confirmed (even circumstantially) exactly zero times - seems to be such a concrete fact now that you'd have to be a moron not to believe that's what the next Nexus is going to be called, right? Is that probably a pretty good guess? Sure! More likely than not, even? I'd take that bet. But it goes to show that many Nexus rumors, such as the name of the product, have been subject to very little scrutiny. Because if no one knows the name, then no one has the right to tell another person that they're wrong about it and oh my god did you hear the Nexus 5 is going to have optical image stabilization? It's totally going to. And the case isn't glass anymore so it won't break and every phone comes with a KitKat bar.
VoIP App 'Viber' Gets A Major Holo-clad Makeover, Releases Desktop Application
It's a pretty big day for Viber, the popular VoIP application that brings "free messages and calls" to your mobile. Seems that the guys behind the app
It's a pretty big day for Viber, the popular VoIP application that brings "free messages and calls" to your mobile. Seems that the guys behind the app (appropriately named Viber Media) have been hard at work preparing not only major updates to the Android and iOS applications, but also on an all-new desktop client for Windows and Mac.
Wordpress App Updated With Holo UI, A Few New Features
Wordpress is a clutch tool for most bloggers, as its easy-to-use, versatile interface provides essentially everything one needs to get content on the
Wordpress is a clutch tool for most bloggers, as its easy-to-use, versatile interface provides essentially everything one needs to get content on the internet. For the longest time, however, the associated app hasn't been the greatest thing to use (read: it kinda sucked); today, however, it has been updated to v2.3 which brings a new Holo UI, along with a few new features.
BBC News App Updated To Work On 1080p Devices, Adds Widgets And A Bit More Holo
BBC News App Updated To Work On 1080p Devices
The BBC News reader on Android got an update today that should please the pixel poppers among the audience. The app has been optimized to take advantage of Super Mega Ultra dense displays like on the Xperia Z and Droid DNA (to say nothing of the upcoming HTC One and Galaxy S 4). A pile of bugs have been squashed in the new update as well.
It's no secret that we're big fans of gReader here at AP, and the latest beta makes us love it even more, as it brings a complete UI overhaul to the application. The dev has redesigned the app to follow the Android Design Guidelines, so it's all Holo-ed out. And it looks fantastic.
AccuWeather is one of the leading apps for getting more information than you could ever possibly need about the position of the sun, clouds, and the statistical likelihood that precipitation will fall from the sky. It has not, however, been the leader in Holo interfaces among weather apps (the Weather Channel beat it to the punch last week). Today, it catches up, though, with a brand spanking new UI.
Here at AP, we rely on HipChat for our internal chatroom(s). Given that, this news is probably more exciting for us than anyone else, but we're sharing it anyway. The HipChat team just released a new beta version of its app to the Play Store, and to put it simply, it's amazing. Compared to the current "stable" build, which ironically isn't very stable at all, the new beta has already proven itself to be the superior choice. So, really, the beta is more stable than the stable build which is more like a beta. How's that for confusing?
Can we be honest with ourselves? Plex kinda sucks. Hard to blame it, most third-party media centers on Android do at the moment. As a lengthy blog post by the developer points out, part of that has been due to Android's inflexibility and lack of a coherent UI in its history. That's changed over the last couple years and now Plex has been rebuilt from the ground up to be a lot more beautiful and a lot more functional.