Google cares about your health and wants to help you stay in shape, which is why the company today released a set of updates and new features for the Google Fit platform across Android smartphones and Wear watches that make it easier to track your daily progress and fitness goals…
Back in May of last year, Google started enforcing a policy that requires Chrome extensions be hosted on its Chrome Web Store, but only on Windows. The goal was to prevent malware hidden in extensions installable from outside its store, and it even started disabling extensions already installed on users’ systems that weren’t hosted on the Chrome Web Store. Now, Google says it will bring that requirement to Mac Chrome users over the coming months, as well as the Chrome developer channel for Windows that wasn’t previously enforcing the policy:
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Google today has released its first application for the Apple Watch in the form of an update to its iOS Google News & Weather app. Launched last fall, Google News & Weather iOS populates local weather and news headlines. On the Apple Watch, based on the screenshots from iTunes, the application pretty much serves the same purpose. Like many other Apple Watch apps based on WatchKit, this new Google application does not appear to be anything special. The screenshots display a bland, text-filled application that is light on functionality…
A new version of the Google Play Store for Android TV has started rolling out this morning (via Android Police) with version number 5.4.12. The update doesn’t bring any drastic changes, but it does pack some notable minor improvements. First, you’ll find that there’s now an “Update all” button to update all of your currently-installed apps at once, and secondly, you’ll notice that the interface has slightly larger tiles.
Other than those two things, the latest version doesn’t seem to bring anything that’s front-facing (although you can be sure there are at least a few bug fixes here and there). If you want to grab the latest version, numbered 5.4.12, it’s readily available at AKMirror. Now we just need some more content in the store and some more games to play using our Nexus Player controllers.
Update: Google has now updated the I/O app in the Play Store with the changes below ahead of May 28 – May 29 event. Grab it on the Play Store now.
The Google I/O app has received a few major updates over the last few years, each one landing right around the time of Google’s huge developers’ conference taking place in San Francisco, California. Now, some users who joined the beta channel of the Google I/O app last year have started receiving the update to its Google I/O 2015 version, and it packs a nifty super-Material redesign…
Nuance Communications today released version 1.9 of Swype Keyboard for Android, “the world’s most powerful keyboard,” which now includes easier number entry and two-word phrase prediction, among other improvements.
The notorious leakster Upleaks has today posted a new image that appears to be an HTC training slide, outlining how the company plans to monetize the home screen of your HTC handset. Yes, you heard that right, HTC—if this rumor turns out to be true—is going to be placing ads and product promotions within its HTC Sense Home home screen…
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As of sometime yesterday, apps in the Play Store can now be listed in search results as “Coming soon”, and clicking on them takes you to a standard listing page that offers the opportunity to “Pre-register”. The first app to take advantage of this functionality is the upcoming Terminator Genisys: Revolution game from Glu…
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Sega announced in a post on its blog this evening that it is going to remove a number of games from its catalog of apps on the Play Store. Sega says that a number of its games on the Play Store no longer meet its “high-quality” standards. Sega will also remove the games from the Apple App Store, the Samsung App Store and the Amazon App Store.
AppChat is a really interesting new app. First released just a week ago in a humble thread on XDA-Developers, the app—which creates little chatrooms for all of your currently-installed apps—has seen the creation of almost 80,000 of these rooms and more than 70,000 messages sent within them. The response has been pretty big, and the app has gone through 6 releases over the last week to make the experience as great as possible.
But what exactly is AppChat?
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We learned back in March that Nintendo would finally be creating games for smartphones and tablets, featuring Mario and other popular characters – though not in their original games. Today brings a mix of bad and good news …
The bad news is that Nintendo announced in its financial results presentation that it is planning to release just five games by March 2017.
Regarding the number of the titles, you may want to know that we will release approximately five titles by the end of the next fiscal year, which is the end of March 2017.
The company says that while it recognizes this will be seen as a small number, there are good reasons behind the decision …
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According to a report this afternoon from Bloomberg, “people familiar with the matter” have said that Google is preparing to give Android users more control over what data gets shared with their apps. Users will, at some point in the near future, have “more detailed choices” over which pieces of their information that apps have access to:
Google’s Android operating system is set to give users more detailed choices over what apps can access, according to the people, who asked not to be identified because the matter remains private. That could include photos, contacts or location. An announcement of the change, which would put Android closer in line with Apple Inc.’s iOS, is expected for Google’s developer’s conference in San Francisco this month, one of the people said.
More than likely, this is a feature that Google will be announcing alongside Android “M” at this year’s Google I/O conference which is set to kick off at the end of the month.
Flickr for Android was updated today with a new auto-upload feature that can privately upload every photo taken on your device to your account for safe keeping. Because Flickr gives users 1,000 GB of free photo storage, you won’t have to worry about running out of room any time soon. Even so, duplicate photos are automatically detected and removed to help save space.
The infamous Amazon Fire Phone is getting a substantial update today, bringing the device from Android Jelly Bean (yes, Jelly Bean) up to the almost not-ancient Android 4.4 Kit Kat. With this version of Android, the phone is getting a plethora of new features that—almost—help bring it into 2015.
YouTube Creator Studio, Google’s mobile app made for YouTube users to manage their channel, has today been updated with Material Design—including a new hamburger button and slide out drawer—among other minor changes.
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Google has announced today, in the midst of teacher appreciation week in the US, that it is bringing some new “Classroom treats” to its mobile app. Most notable among the changes is the ability to grade assignments from the app (as you can see above), and the ability to “add private feedback to give students guidance, encouragement, constructive criticism or personalized feedback.”
Other features are also being added, including the ability to create and edit assignments while on a mobile device, as well as the ability to create an assignment simply with the snap of a photo. Google says that teachers can learn more about how to use these features at its new Support page, which outlines how to create and modify an assignment within the app:
You can create an assignment in your class stream, attach materials to it, assign it to one or more classes, and grade and return it to students. After you create an assignment, all students in the class receive a notification by email (if they haven’t turned off notifications) and can see the assignment in the class stream.
These features should be rolling out “this week,” according to Google.
Google has long had Optical Character Recognition features in Google Drive, allowing scanned paper document uploaded to Drive to be indexed and edited. Now, Google just recently expanded the feature to more than 200 languages and 25 writing styles.
To make this possible, engineering teams across Google pursued an approach to OCR focused on broad language coverage, with a goal of designing an architecture that could potentially work with all existing languages and writing systems. We do this in part by using Hidden Markov Models (HMMs) to make sense of the input as a whole sequence, rather than first trying to break it apart into pieces. This is similar to how modern speech recognition systems recognize audio input…
Once you scan a document and upload it to Drive, you just need to right-click on it and select ‘Open with’ -> ‘Google Docs’.
Google adds that you don’t even need to set your language preference, Drive will automatically detect it when uploading a document.
You can access the OCR features both on the web and through the Google Drive app for Android.
Wearables are slowly but surely making their way into our daily lives, but one very critical aspect—health—is already helping to bring them mainstream. It’s something that every person is conscious of on a daily basis, and wearable device makers—as evidenced by the countless fitness trackers on the market—want to make it easier to stay on top of exercise, diet, and more. But another aspect of our health, chronic illness, is also big opportunity for wearables to make a difference—and they already are.
About half of all American adults have some kind of chronic illness, and diabetes is one of the most common. With the advent of smartwatches, we all now have quick access to at least one useful stat: our heart rate. But what if those with diabetes could just as easily monitor blood glucose levels? No mainstream smartwatch can monitor this alone, yet, but now one developer has released an app for Android Wear that will plug into a Dexcom CGM (continuous glucose monitor), providing glanceable updates every five minutes on blood glucose levels.
According to a report this morning from The Information, Google is planning to introduce an interesting new feature for Play Store listings at this year’s Google I/O developers’ conference. A common practice within apps themselves, new “A/B testing” would allow developers to test multiple versions of their app listings to see which ones bring the most conversions…
Popular feed reader app Feedly has been updated today to version 27 with a handful of new features. First off, the update adds Google Now integration. The app will now push the most interesting stories to Google Now every morning at 7:00AM, allowing you to quickly digest the most important news of the day.
Google today has started rolling out an update to the Play Store app that bumps it to version 5.5. The update doesn’t add much, but it keeps with Google’s trend of enhancing the design of its in-house apps. With Play Store 5.5, Google has added a new circular animation that appears when you tap on a TV show title.
Microsoft has updated its Remote Desktop app for Android with a number of new features including a brand new UI that includes a “new connection center and in-session improvements.”
Also included in the update is multi-session support, allowing you to run multiple application or desktop sessions simultaneously. In addition, you’ll find a few other improvements including overall stability enhancements and a lot of bug fixes for issues that many users were experiencing.
The updated Microsoft Remote Desktop app, version 8.1.11, is available on Google Play now.
What’s New
What’s new in 8.1.11This release introduces a completely brand new client. We’ve put a lot of work into delivering a new improved experience that provides:– A new user interface – New connection center and in-session improvements– Multi-session support – Run more than one application or desktop session at a time– Overall stability – Lots of bug fixesThanks to everyone for the on-going feedback and support!
Meerkat may have had the launch of its live video streaming app rather overshadowed by Twitter’s official app, Periscope, but it has today made it to Android ahead of its competitor.
Meerkat allows you to live stream video from your phone to all of your Twitter followers at once. Press ‘Stream’, and instantly your live video stream shows up in your follower’s Twitter feeds.
When your followers have the app, they will also get pushed notified with your live stream, watch, comment and interact with it using the app.
It’s officially a beta, so don’t expect everything to work perfectly, but TechCrunch says that it appears to work well …
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HTC has today pushed an update to its Camera app, packing a plethora of great new features for owners of HTC’s current flagship and past flagships alike. Most notably is the addition of Raw Camera mode, which lets users take photos and save them in their original, unchanged —hence the name “raw”—state…
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