I’m excited to announce that Hello Friends has been updated to receive some new features and improvements and is now available for free.

Filters

With today’s update Hello Friends gets new filters which are powered by the Nokia Imaging SDK. After including the Nokia Imaging SDK in our apps OneShot and Lock Buster, we were sure you would enjoy the same filters in Hello Friends, as well. With popular filters like Valencia, Hudson and Vintage, Hello Friends 5.0 comes with 14 high-quality filters that give your lock screen collages a special look.

Share your collage

With today’s release you are now able to share your collages via email, messaging, twitter and more. Show your peeps some love! You will also find a menu item in the app bar that allows you to save your collage to the local pictures library.

Instant refresh

In the editing screen you now have another app bar button that allows you to use the instant refresh function. You are asked to pin a tile to the start screen which allows you to refresh your lock screen at any time by only tapping once on the tile.

Overlaid fader

We’ve been listening to our users and added an option to change the overlaid shade at the bottom of the collage. With today’s release you are now able to choose between “No Shading”, “Light Shading” and the default shading overlay.

Improvements

We also added a number of improvements to the current release. The background refresh process has been optimized in terms of memory consumption and is now running even more reliable. We also fixed some bugs and introduced some minor changes to the trial version.

Summary

We added a couple of interesting new options to the current release of Hello Friends 5.0 which help you to make your lock screen look even better. You can download the app for free in the Windows Phone Store: