Tuesday, February 4, 2014

Holofication Nation Holo-fies your apps

Holo UI is a beautiful yet functional user interface standard that more and more app developers are adopting and applying to their work. Having a majority of your apps designed with Holo in mind really makes for a smooth user experience, especially since Holo is so flexible and can be applied in many unique ways.

However, some of our most used apps refuse to adopt our favorite style. Good on Google for not making Holo mandatory, but shame on some developers for creating poor apps. We’re looking at you, Facebook. And honestly, Steam is both hideous and not particularly functional. Luckily, there is someone watching out for us, and that’s the Holofication Nation!

The Holofication Nation is a group of people (currently two) who are tasked with redesigning current apps to a Holo standard, so those who use these apps extensively won’t have to suffer with a disjointed user interface. They have currently redesigned four apps: Instagram, Steam, Snapchat and Grooveshark. (Sorry, Facebook isn’t possible; the UI is controlled by its servers).

The work they are doing is quite impressive because they’re using the original apps, not creating new ones. Unfortunately, this does mean you have to uninstall the original to use these apps. These modified versions will be replacing the originals, but you could always go back if you’d like.

Because this is only a two man team, we shouldn’t expect a ton of apps to be redone in a short time period. If you have some experience modifying apps, you should join the team and help them out! But if not, you can still download these apps and give them a try. Also, you can join their Google+ page to show some support! What do you think of their efforts? Tell us in the comments!