holo there!

Here are some designs I did for the app 90night. Get 90night:

Sat, 02 Mar 2013 11:19:00 -0500

Here are some designs I did for the app 90night.

Get 90night:

Mon, 21 Jan 2013 16:20:21 -0500

a holo Outlook on life.

Wed, 28 Nov 2012 10:52:00 -0500

Lots of people talking about the Outlook.com app this week and how bad it is so I thought I’d take a look and redesign it.

It’s HEAVILY influenced by the Gmail and Email app from ICS and above and the Sydrive app. I’d love to know what you think.

Album available on Google+, contains individual images and Nexus 10 mock up.

Sky+ for Android redesign!

Tue, 20 Nov 2012 15:07:25 -0500

Hey, the Sky+ App for Android is pretty bad and lacks a LOAD of features so I took a look at the iOS version and androidified it!

Love some of this, will add more screens to the album soon and improve some other screens. I really wanted to share this with you so I thought I’d post this anyway :)

Twitter for Tablets

Tue, 23 Oct 2012 16:51:00 -0400

This isn’t as Holo as it could be, but still, Apple going up on stage and saying Android has no tablet apps really bugged me, and honestly they’re right.

Get your shit together Android developers. Bring you A game.

Facebook Messenger holo style.

Thu, 27 Sep 2012 14:25:00 -0400

Facebook messenger looks like ass on my Nexus 7. Full width list views annoy me :(

Here is how I think it should look on tablets :)

Full resolution: First shot, second shot

here’s a little preview of what i’m doing next ;)

Wed, 26 Sep 2012 18:16:05 -0400

here’s a little preview of what i’m doing next ;)

uTorrent Holo :)

Wed, 05 Sep 2012 16:14:00 -0400

So uTorrent released an official app for Android, and it looks pretty bad. So here is my take on it! :)

"There have been lots of blog posts, articles in the news and discussions on why apps look so much..."

Wed, 22 Aug 2012 15:39:52 -0400

“There have been lots of blog posts, articles in the news and discussions on why apps look so much better on iOS than they do on Android. The problem with these articles is that they go straight to the software and blame it, they simply say “because iOS is better”, I believe this is not the case. Android is not the problem, Android developers are the cause, they think just because it is easy to publish on the Play Store and make money they don’t have to care about how their apps look. They simply throw on some shitty design they do in about an hour or two and say that’s fine, let’s make my self rich.
There are many apps which look amazing, and the commonality between these apps is that they follow the Android Design Guidelines. Below are screenshots[1] just some of my favourite good designed apps from Android (TED, Foursquare and FlightTrack) : The above screenshots show just how good looking the apps can be, if the developers just took some timeout and focused on designing it, and as you can see they follow the guidelines set by Google.
I just want Google to start looking at how many ugly apps there are in their Play Store and start enforcing developers to follow their guidelines and design better looks apps.
I am aware that Apple makes it easier to design good looking apps because of their Xcode and that for Android it is more time consuming (due to fragmentation) and is a big harder but in this century it is all about how good looking things are, if it looks crap then chances are you will be missing out on many sales/downloads.
I also want developers to focus their apps for Android OS 2.3+, and also the recent study on fragmentation of Android shows that HTC and Samsung are the winners and “Testing on the most popular Samsung & HTC devices will get you a long way”[2].
Just as a side note, I wish developers would stop just porting their iOS designed app to Android, that is not how it is supposed to be done. They are two different OS with many differences. One of the culprits is Instagram, they have 99% copied their iOS design to Android. If they followed the guidelines and designed for Android from ground up this is how good it can look[3]: So Android developers, go forth and focus on design as much are you are focusing on the code.
The screenshots are taken from Android niceties blog, this blog highlights the best looking Android apps and worth browsing for inspiration.
OpenSignalMaps done a study on the fragmentation of the Android market back in May.
This was designed by snalty and posted on The Verge forums showing how it would have looked like if they followed the Android design principles.”

- Finite Post: Dear Google, Please Force Developers To Follow Android Design Guidelines

Holo, iPlayer

Sun, 05 Aug 2012 17:26:00 -0400

Hey again, I’m back!

Today I learnt that sadly, the BBC iPlayer app is not compatible with Jelly Bean devices (Not really the Beeb’s fault honestly, Adobes fault for not doing flash for Jelly Bean). It was also pretty ugly anyway so thought it needed a redesign with some Holo styling!

So here it goes…

Really love what I’ve done here. Made it so tabs are swipable and given it some action bar love with a nice purple accent. I also made a Video page which is inspired by the YouTube app.

Tell me what you think! :D

Holo, Engadget

Tue, 24 Jul 2012 15:30:30 -0400

The current Engadget for Android app is horrible.

It’s completely broken and features some iOS concepts such as bottom tabs and a centred logo. It uses horrible low resolution assets in it’s design and breaks if you load it while the phone is horizontal which is ridiculous

Here is how I think it should look:

Thanks for looking! :)

Holo Steam

Tue, 24 Jul 2012 15:20:20 -0400

Made this Steam redesign a long time ago and thought I would share. The original app is a horrid iOS port with some laggy webviews. While this uses the beautiful holo design. Using the action bar and the ICS style list view with some nice full bleed images.

Thanks for looking! :)

Holo Instagram

Tue, 24 Jul 2012 15:14:13 -0400

Instagram is an app used by many people

It’s a very well designed app but it throws away some important android design principles like the action bar and tab design and placement. So I decided I should redesign then app to apply the guidelines set by Google which many developers, including Instagram, choose to ignore.

So here it is:

This design is heavily influenced by the Google Now UI and features a similar card like display. I have also mostly used stock icons while still retaining the Instagram branding.

I’d love to know what you think :)