Today I get to show you a brand new icon pack from Samer Zayer. This is his latest icon pack to be released and it’s called Marvak.
Many of you may already know who Samer Zayer is. The man is pretty well-known among the Android theming community and he currently has 15 applications in the Google Play Store. Most of them are icon packs so if you are into icon packs at all then you may have already stumbled upon his work. Even if you didn’t realize that you have.
Marvak is his latest creation and it is a very bold, colorful and beautiful icon pack that features round icons. Let’s go ahead and dive into the companion application.
Companion App
After the icon pack is installed and we open up the companion application, we’re greeted with the traditional icon pack interface. The is similar to what we saw when I reviewed Type-1 a few weeks ago and it seems to be a common template for themers to use. We’re greeted with some sample icons to show off the style of the icon pack and then we have some sections in the home screen. First is a nice little welcome message and then we are told about Muzei support, a link to other themes, a link to a wallpaper application and lastly a way to find Samer Zayer on Google+. Tapping the 3-dot menu icon at the top right will extend the menu where we can go to the About page, view the Changelog, the settings for Muzei and the settings for the companion application itself.
As we dig into the settings options for this icon pack, I first want to show you the Muzei settings. Marvak has integration into Muzei and from here you can change the refresh rate of Muzei, change whether or not it is allowed to refresh on WiFi, on mobile data or both and then we have a check box where we can select xxhdpi mode. As you can see at the top, the text is cut off and I don’t know if this is because I’m using CM12.1’s Expanded Desktop feature to hide the status bar or what. Moving onto the companion application settings we see that it shows us some details about the memory usage of Marvak. There’s also a couple features listed at the bottom for the App theme(which can be changed from a dark theme to a light theme) and then we have the ability to remove the app icon from the app drawer. For those who like a cleaner application drawer.
Overview and Help
If we swipe in from the left side of the screen(or tap the overflow menu button at the top left), then can see the other sections of the Marvak companion application. First I’m going to highlight the help section and this is the place to go if you are having difficulties learning how to apply or customize the icons for a particular Android custom launcher. As you can see, the default one is set on Action since these are in ABC order and if you tap on the drop down menu option at the top left then we see a whole list of other supported launchers. Marvak currently supports Action Launcher, ADW Launcher, ADW/EX Launcher, Apex Launcher, Atom Launcher, Aviate Launcher, Cyanogen’s Theme Engine, GO Launcher, Inspire Launcher, KK Launcher, Lucid Launcher, Next Launcher, Nine Launcher, Solo Launcher, Smart Launcher, Themer, TSF Shell Launcher and the Unicon Xposed Module.
Heading back into the overflow menu, then tapping on the Apply section will take us to that part of the companion application. This section will list all of the different custom launchers that I just listed above and then tell you whether or not the companion application can detect the launcher or not. As you can see from the screenshots above, the companion application detects both Cyanogen as well as Nova(even though I don’t have Nova Launcher activated). Tapping on one of these options will either take you to the page where you can apply the icon pack, or a prompt will appear asking if you want to let the companion application theme your icons for that launcher. For example, tapping on Cyanogen will take me directly to the Themes page where I can apply the icon pack myself but tapping on Nova will ask me whether or not to let Marvak theme the app icons for me.
Wallpapers
As with most icon packs nowadays, Marvak comes with some wallpapers for you to use alongside your brand new icon pack. These are picked out by the icon pack themer, Samer Zayer in this case, and you will always be able to change to another wallpaper from within the companion application. There are 20 different wallpapers to choose from and each of them fit with Marvak’s icon pack style very well. Some have a brick pattern, some have a nice triangle pattern and then some look painted with different shades of a specific color. The collection seems good enough to cover a wide gamut of colors that match nicely with the icon pack’s colors.
Tapping on one of these wallpapers will download it temporarily from the cloud and then you’ll get to see what the wallpaper looks like up close. You can tap and swipe around on the wallpaper to get a look at the whole thing since they are most likely going to be bigger than what your screen can handle. This helps to give you that scrolling effect when you’re swiping from page to page. When you’re done looking at a wallpaper, simple tap the back button in the navigation bar or tap the FAB that you see at the bottom right. This will expand the FAB to reveal three different options. One to apply the wallpaper, one to save the wallpaper to your device(locally) and the last one is another way to go back to the list of wallpapers.
While looking at the wallpapers, you’ll see a column icon at the top right of your screen in the action bar. This is the little button to the left of the 3-dot menu icon and tapping this will bring up a dialog box. As you can see from the image above, this text doesn’t show up very well when you are in Light Theme mode. This is actually an issue with all(or most) dialog boxes that appear when you are in Light Theme mode. Since this is the initial release of Marvak, I imagine this was just something that slipped through the cracks and that Samer will release an update to fix this very soon. This feature though, it allows you to change the grid view of the wallpaper section. You can change it from 1 columns to 2 columns to 3 columns, which is nice as it lets you customize the view to however you like it best.
App Icons
Continuing on with the overflow menu options that we have in the companion application, we come across the application icons list section. We have six different columns here but the New column is blank for now(since the application was just released) so I’m leaving that out. Swiping over to the Apps column we get to see there are a lot, and I mean a lot of 3rd party applications listed here. Samer says there are over 1,800 HD icons in this application at launch and this is where we get to go through them all to see what they look like. It felt like I was scrolling forever through this list because there were so many of them.
If we continue swiping over to the right, we have the application icons broken up into different sections. There’s a section for Games, which lists all of the app icons for the various games that are supported. Then there’s a section for Google applications, which lists all of the core Google applications that are supported by Marvak. Then there’s a System section which lists core system icons and all of their variations. For example, there are 10 different color options for things like the Phone app, the Contacts app, the Messaging app, etc. This allows you to use custom launchers that have the ability to customize specific icons to pick whichever color icons that you like the most. Since I use the Google Now Launcher, it seems to have picked random colors for the various ones it applied.
Just like Type-1 has, this companion application allows me to request which applications that I want to see themed in the future. This is not a guarantee that applications will be themed in the future though so please do not get mad at Samer if you sent in a request and it takes him a while to theme your apps. Even if he doesn’t ever theme it at all, that is no reason to get mad at him or leave a negative review. He is only one person and he is managing dozens of icon packs all at the same time. What this does is give him an idea about which apps are the most popular so that he can theme those first. This feature will gather all of the apps that are not officially themed and create an email for you to send. After it composes the email, all you have to do is press the end button and away it goes.
The second two screenshots above show you what the Marvak icon pack looks like on my LG G3(which is running CyanogenMod 12.1). I think I would like this icon pack a little more if the colors were all the same. I’m just not sure I like to see all the different colors mixed in. This is partially my own issue though(besides it being my personal preference) since I am using the Google Now Launcher. As I mentioned earlier, some of these apps have 10 different color options and I think I would like it better if I could switch between them. So if I were to use something like Nova launcher then it would be more pleasing to my eyes. Again, this isn’t a knock on the icon pack itself, I’m just giving my opinion about how it’s setup with my phone right now.
Conclusion
I wanted to end this review with a couple of up close images so that you can get a look at just how much detail has been put into these apps. Applications above like Speedtest, System Monitor and ES File Explorer are all themed. Applications like CF.lumen, BuildProp Editor and textdroider_dpi are not themed but they still kind of look like they are. This is the same app icon cloaking that was mentioned in the last icon pack review I did and I love this. Samer adds a nice touch by adding in shadows for the app icons as well. I think this is a ‘trick’ and while it looks good in these examples, it could look strange if an icon is unique enough that doesn’t match the shadow that it is given by default.
Overall though, I think this is a really nice effect as it gives the illusion that it is still being themed so at least they match with the other icons in the Marvak icon pack. I will outright refuse to use an icon pack that doesn’t use this icon cloaking feature. I just can’t stand it when default icons are mixed in with themed icons. To me, it’s one of those all or nothing things but this icon cloaking type feature makes it usable and it’s something that I really, really enjoy seeing in icon packs right now.
