Button Materials and Animated Backgrounds

A theme gives you a whole look in one tap. The question people kept asking is the other one: can I have part of it?

As of this week, yes. Two of the things that used to arrive only inside a theme are now their own controls.

Materials, in the Buttons panel

Shape and colour used to be the whole story there. There is now a Material row beside them.

Metal gives your links a polished steel surface — the same one Liquid Chrome wears — with a highlight that travels down the list. It brings its own surface and its own text colour, so the two colour pickers below it stop applying while it is on. The panel says so, rather than letting you wonder why nothing is changing.

Porcelain does the opposite. It leaves your colours alone and lifts the buttons off the page on a deep, soft shadow tinted from your own button colour, with a light edge along the top. It works on any palette because it is made out of yours.

Material is separate from shape, and that separation is the feature. Metal pills, metal squares, porcelain rows with a hard shadow — all of them exist, because you are choosing two things instead of one.

The eight shapes and both colour pickers stay free.

Two more backgrounds

The Wallpaper library gained two scenes, beside the photos and the video clips.

Brushed Steel is a machined surface under a single cold light, with an iridescence crossing it: blue leading, white at the centre, pink trailing.

Petal Fall is the first light scene in that library — blush, with petals drifting down in two planes.

Both scale cleanly down to the picker tile, so you can tell them apart before you commit to one.

Mixing

Nothing stops you combining them. Metal buttons over Petal Fall is not a theme anyone shipped, and it is a page you can build in about four taps.

Materials and the background library are both Pro. Everything you have already saved keeps working exactly as it does now, and if a plan lapses your shape, your colours and your background colour all stay — only the paid layer stops painting.