Hands on with Live Lock Screen(s) for Windows Phone 8.1

During Microsoft’s BUILD developers conference this year, they unveiled the latest version of their mobile operating system; Windows Phone 8.1. Although it wasn’t such a radical redefinition like from WP7 to WP8, it did bring in the features which has been long wanted by windows phone users/fanatics. Cortana and Action Center was probably the most eye catching feature in this new version of Windows Phone but there was another feature which Joe talked about and that was the animated/live lock screens which are similar to custom lock screens on android. This new feature is enabled by the new API introduced during BUILD 2014 and this app in particular is the first of its kind. Made by Microsoft, this should give users a taste of what to expect in the near future when other devs start cracking their head to make more bold designs.

This is Material Design and yeah it's Awesome!

When google overhauled the Android design philosophy in Ice Cream Sandwich, they introduced a whole theme called holo. Android versions after that like Jellybean continued to use the holo theme but when Kitkat was revealed last year, the holo theme hasn’t been much of a design highlight. Instead a more brighter and minimalistic design status was showcased in Android 4.4 Kitkat. At Google IO this year, Matias Duarte the man behind the design overhaul in Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich introduces a new design language called material design alongside the Android L release (developer preview). This time around the design overhaul not only affects android, other google products like android wear and android tv are also being themed under this new design language.