New app lets you bring one of the Samsung Galaxy S6 Edge’s best features to any phone (sort of)

The Samsung Galaxy S6 Edge won’t be along until April 10th, but if you’re finding it hard to wait that long you can get a small taste of what it’s like to use one of its coolest feature ahead of actually getting one.

A new app called Edge Color Notifications has hit the Google Play Store, and its function is as you’d imagine: it’ll illuminate the sides of your display in different colors depending on who’s calling. You’ll be able to choose from the entire set of colors available on a standard color wheel, and you’ll have control over whether the right side, left side or both sides of the screen illuminate during a call.

Before you rush to go download it, there are a couple of things you should note. For starters, this doesn’t come with any of the cool features that the Samsung Galaxy S6 Edge provides like being able to pull on a contact’s color to gain access to messaging and other contact options.

Something else to note is that the “cool” factor of this feature on the S6 Edge mostly has to do with the fact that its curved display makes it easy for the display to illuminate the surface it’s sitting on when face down. Kind of hard to replicate that if you’re using a phone without a curved display (of which there aren’t many).

Perhaps a bit of light can shine through, but it won’t be nearly as profound of an effect as it is on the Samsung Galaxy S6 Edge. Still, it’s pretty cool that someone was able to make something like this just days after they got the inspiration. Give it a download for free right here if you’re interested.

It’s official: Windows 10 can run Android apps… sort of

Yesterday, we heard about Microsoft’s plans to get Android apps to run on Windows 10. We likened the idea to Blackberry’s Android runtime used on their latest devices that allows Android developers to easily port their apps over.

Well, the news was true, but only to a degree. Microsoft has equipped developers with tools to easily port their Android and iOS apps to Windows 10, only this is no mere emulation or runtime. Instead, it’s a custom platform called Astoria that opens up Windows 10 development to a number of new languages.

For Android, developers can now code directly in C++ and Java to make sure they don’t have to write entirely new code bases from scratch. iOS developers will also be treated to support for Objective-C. Microsoft will make it extremely easy for developers to get comfortable developing for Windows using this SDK.

There are a couple of hurdles to consider, though you can be sure Microsoft was mindful about them. Namely, they recognize that not all developers can fully port their code base to Windows 10 without the help of some of Google’s proprietary services and APIs.

Microsoft says it’s their goal to build many of these types of services and tools themselves to fill in some of those gaps. It’s not all that dissimilar to Amazon and their Kindle Fire devices. While apps can be ported over to those devices in native fashion, Amazon still had to create their own APIs and platforms to fill in for the missing Google bits.

Whether this is going to be enough to fix Microsoft’s apps problem is still up in the air, but at least they’ve gone about trying to fix it it in a very creative, sensible and — honestly — exciting way. We hope to learn more soon.

[via The Verge]