Tag: Material Design

Over the course of the past few months, Google has been rolling out a new bright & white look to many of their apps and services.  Gmail and Google Drive are two such examples and it all seems to be tied to the Mountain View company’s efforts to refresh everything and bring more Material Design into their sites and apps.  The latest site to get this new bright & white update is the Google Support site.

Ditching its compact now seemingly dated look, the Google Support site reflects the change in site layout and philosophy from Google.  With a bright white background, the new site has large icons for you to select to get to support information for various Google apps and services.  These naturally look more touch friendly for touchscreen devices like the Google Pixelbook.

The Google Payments Center is likely one of the few Google sites that you rarely visit.  It is a central location where you can see all of your payment information such as your recent purchases, your credit cards and shipping addresses, and your subscriptions that you have through Google.  It is a site that, to be fair, you rarely need to use as most of the information in it can be found in the Play Store app or in Google Pay.

That doesn’t mean that Google doesn’t think it is important and over the weekend gave it a heavy Material Design makeover.  The update was a cloud-side push as these things tend to go so there is nothing you need to do on your end.  Just go to https://pay.google.com and you will be dropped into the new & improved Google Payment Center site.

A new Material Design look is in the process of rolling out for Google Maps on Android devices.  The update is a cloud-side change but you’ll want to make sure that you have the latest version of the app installed on your phone.  For those curious, that’s version 9.79.2.  Since this is a cloud-side update to Google Maps, not everyone is seeing the changes just yet.  It will likely be several days before all accounts get it.

Once you do, the changes will be immediately noticeable.  Gone are the square information blocks and icons on the Explore tab, replaced with bright, rounded corner information boxes and round icons.

Google has announced that the Google Sign-in screen that you use to sign into your account will be changing on June 14th.  The updated screen will be more in line with Material Design principles with an updated Google logo, outline of text boxes and everything being centered in the sign-in screen itself.

The Mountain View company has indicated that this change will be available for everyone across all G Suite domains and consumer accounts.

A new and much improved Keyboard Shortcut Viewer is coming to Chrome OS.  In the Chrome OS Canary Channel, which is currently running a pre-alpha build of Chrome 67, the viewer has been radically updated to a Material Design look and feel.

The find comes from long time platform evangelist François Beaufort via his Google+ profile.  François is one of the best sources for what is coming in the Canary channel and this is another great example of it.

Yesterday, Google announced that Google Pay was being officially launched with new branding and app updates.  The update to the old Android Pay app is now rolling out and it brings not only a name change, but a substantial user experience update.  The first public version of Google Pay for Android is 1.53 and it will replace your Android Pay app on your phone when you get the OTA update.

When you first open the app, you will immediately see the improvements in the app.  It has a light theme to it and has a two-tab bottom navigation.  The Home screen has a carousel of all of your cards and payment options at the top.  Simply slide to the card you want to use while you are paying at a terminal to use that card.  If you want to make it your default card, just long press it.