According to a report from The Verge, Google is building its own third-party keyboard for iOS and has been doing so for “months.” While it’s unclear when or if the keyboard will be released, the report notes of several features Google has been working to implement as employees test it.
Following the removal of the notification center last year, Chrome is now getting rid of the app launcher in Mac, Windows, and Linux. It will be a slow process, but the rarely used launcher for Chrome and web apps will be fully removed for all users in July.
From adding regional accents to multiple male and female voices, Google has made great strides in making computers sound more natural. According to a video posted today on YouTube, a new voice rolling out to Google Now takes that a step further…
Google Photos launched last year with numerous smart features, like face and object detection, that make sorting and finding your photos much easier. While the Assistant feature can already create photo collages and animations from burst shots, albums are about to get smarter with more features in an update rolling out today…
An update rolling out to Google Drive for Android will allow you to more easily edit documents and images uploaded to Drive using edit apps like Google Photos and Google Docs. The update also adds more options to sort files.
An update rolling out to Google Maps on Android allows users to label any location with a nickname for easier search and lets users add a whimsical sticker icon to represent their home and work addresses.
Popular song identification app Shazam has announced (via The Verge) deeper Google Play Music integration on Android, as well as a promotion for 3 months of Play Music (which includes YouTube Red) for only $1.
Starting with Android 5.0 Lollipop, Chrome tabs could exist individually in the app switcher. While it made websites feel more like apps, it was an annoyance that made it hard to keep track of open tabs. Google is now reversing that decision (as spotted by Android Central) and making merged tab the new default starting in version 49 of Chrome.
With Chrome 49 fully rolled out to desktops, Android, and Chrome OS, version 50 is now in the beta channel. It is expected to bring Material Design to the browser and introduce improved push notifications and other developer focused features.
T-Mobile is expanding its Binge On initiative that allows users to stream content in certain apps without using up their data allowance, and with today’s update YouTube and Google Play Movies are now officially supported.
Google is adding the ability to set expiration dates for access to documents across Google Drive, Docs, Sheets and Slides apps. The idea is that you can limit a contributor’s access to a document for a specific time period, which Google points out will come in handy for companies and organizations that often share files with third-parties temporarily:
Google Maps is adding new ride options on mobile devices today as it turns the former Uber-only feature into a section dedicated to several car services. It’s launching today for Android users and coming soon to other platforms.
Google announced today that it’s bringing the “Smart Reply” feature previously only available to mobile users to Inbox by Gmail on the web.
Both Google+ and Google Photos have been updated with a bottom bar in the past few months. Google is now officially embracing bottom navigation with an update to the Material Design spec.
Google is announcing several big Android gaming updates at this year’s Game Developers Conference. A majority of them will be user facing, like app streaming and more social features in Play Games, while others will help developers market and add new features to their games.
With very little effort, anyone can use IFTTT to program services to trigger actions based on other events. LG has now opened up their smartphones to serve as triggers and allow other services to initiate hardware and software features on the device.
Update: f.lux is now available in the Play Store.
There are many apps that change the color temperature of a screen throughout the day. Many of these apps claim to help users sleep by limiting exposure to blue light at night that can distort the natural circadian rhythm. One of the first and most well-known entrants to this market is f.lux. They have finally released a beta for Android and it is available for testing.
When Google+ launched in 2011, one of its marquee features was grouping people into circles. There was a nifty drag-and-drop interface and the ability to limit posts to specific circles. Last year’s Google+ redesign hid the feature, but an update to the Android app now resurfaces it. The social network is also launching Google+ Create to recognize top content creators and give them access to early features.
Google is rolling out a new feature for Google Docs on Android and the web today that will make navigating through long documents much easier. The new “outline tool” adds a new pane on the left of the page adds quickly links to the document’s headers so you can quickly jump to that section without having to scroll through the whole document to get there.
Displayed in a pane to the left of the page, the outline features headers for each section of your document, making it simple to quickly jump from section to section. If you haven’t manually applied headers, no worries—we’ll do it for you, intelligently detecting the logical divisions within your work. You can then edit or remove these headers as necessary.
And there’s also a second component to it that lets users scroll through documents easier with a new “navigation handle” that will appear once you start to scroll. “Touching that handle will display the entire document’s structure, allowing you quickly skip from section to section, instead of slowly swiping up and down.”
Here’s a look at the feature in action:
Look out for the feature in Google Docs on Android and the web starting today.
For all the features the Google app has added, it still does not have any image recognition capabilities. Google Goggles from 2010 could recognize book covers, landmarks, and even solve Sudoku, but was ultimately discontinued due to a lack of use. However, Now on Tap has gained some of those features in a recent update.
Google Photos already lets users backup and view an unlimited number of high-resolution photos and videos for free, and Google recently added a button that lets users manually purge downloaded content to make room for more free storage. There’s a new update awaiting Google Photos users today that adds support for the latest software and hardware features on iPhones and iPads.
After many months of A/B testing, Facebook is finally releasing an update for Messenger featuring Material Design to all users today. The final version that is coming out to phones today features a blue top bar and a floating action button, along with other visual tweaks.
Since its launch two years ago, Inbox has gotten more powerful and added legacy features from Gmail while remaining simple and smart. A minor update today adds the much-needed ability to expand the compose window on the web.
Following this morning’s update that added more editing tools to Google Photos website, the Android app has received a slight redesign. Besides the new design and performance enhancements, editing tools and other functionality remains the same.