SwiftKey is one of the most popular third-party keyboards across both iOS and Android, and the company today released the latest beta version of its Android app. The app’s main functionality hasn’t changed, but this update brings a completely redesigned options menu—and I think it suits the keyboard pretty well…
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Google today released the latest Beta channel release for Chrome OS users and with it comes a few new features that should arrive for all soon.
First up, the beta release brings Material Design to the Files app, the ability to pin apps to the shelf, and support for password-protected zip files.
The update also includes an updated calculator app, according to Google highlight of features on its Chrome Releases blog, and “bug fixes, security updates and feature enhancements”
The new Chrome OS beta, version 42.0.2311.41, is rolling out for all Chrome OS devices in the coming days except the following: “Pixel, Acer Chromebox CXI, LG Chromebase, Asus Chromebox, Dell Chromebox, HP Chromebox, HP Chromebook 14, Toshiba Chromebook, Acer C720, Dell Chromebook 11.”
Google today announced that it’s launching a beta channel or Android WebView, the API many apps use to display webpages. Google noted that with Android 5.0 Lollipop, it now “has the ability to update WebView independently.” It will begin to allow developers to use the new beta channel for testing the latest updates to WebView starting today:
WebView updates bring numerous bug fixes, new web platform APIs and updates from Chromium. If you’re making use of the WebView in your app, becoming a beta channel tester will give you an early start with new APIs as well as the chance to test your app before the WebView rolls out to your users.
Developers interested in becoming beta testers can join the community here in order to sign up for the program and install the WebView beta from Google Play.
Instagram users on Android could soon be using pre-release versions of the photo sharing app before updates hit the Google Play Store.
Instagram is currently inviting testers on Android to take pre-release versions of its social app for a spin through its beta program for users. The social network shared a Google Group found here where potential testers can apply to test and give feedback for versions of Instagram currently being developed.
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Following an invite-only rollout last June, Google Domains on Tuesday became available as a public beta in the United States. Google Domains is a domain name service, similar to GoDaddy or NameCheap, that enables users to search for, register and manage domain names. Alongside the public beta, Google has announced a number of new features to the service.
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Update 1/15/15: The non-Beta version of the app was updated today with the same features that came to the beta version last month.
Wikipedia is definitely one the more used Android apps, and today the app’s beta channel has been updated with a plethora of new features. Most notable of them is the fact that today’s release packs a Material design revamp (including a new drawer and overflow menu), and support for Android 5.0 Lollipop. Other features, like the return of the search bar and other layout improvements, are just a couple of the more than a dozen changes made in this version.
The new version also features improvements to search order, Wikidata descriptions under page’s titles in search, and swipe to refresh on pages and on the “Nearby” tab. You’ll also notice, at the bottom of an article you’re reading, that this new version adds a new section called “Read more” where you’ll find various related articles. Finally, rounding out the more obvious changes, there’s now an option in the “More” section for disabling image loading (helpful if you are strapped for data).
As noted on the app’s Play Store listing, here’s the complete list of changes:
– Material design icons and 5.0 support– Search bar is back– Search order improvements– Wikidata descriptions in search results, similar pages, under pages titles– Swipe to refresh on pages and for Nearby– Collapsed infoboxes– Better tablets layouts– Read more section– Allow disabling images– Basic syntax highlighting of templates while editing– Hide IPA– ToC drawer always on– Similar pages, page issues, reference info display changes– Display MathML images– Remove pinch-zoom
VLC (Video LAN Client) has long been one of the choice media players for Android users, but—while every release has been basically stable—the company hasn’t been in any rush to push the app out of beta and on to version 1.0. Today, that finally happened, and the update packs a bunch of other goodies including fixes for ARM V8 processors and Android 5.0 Lollipop.
According to the app’s Play Store listing, version 1.0 includes the following:
This release fixes ARMv8 processors, Android 5.0 crashes and minor improvements. The 0.9.x series is major release with hardware decoding and a new interface available in dark or white colors. It integrates DVD iso and menu support, an equalizer, playlist management, Widi screens support and updated SD cards detection. Hardware acceleration is now enabled by default on 4.3+ and has better subtitles support. Software decoding has been accelerated too.
A new feature called Smart Lock has now made its way to Chromebooks, allowing users to keep their Chrome OS-running laptops unlocked by simply keeping their Lollipop Android phone in relative vicinity. The feature was first introduced earlier this year at Google I/O 2014, and has been part of Lollipop since the OS started rolling out last month. But only just now, about 6 months after it was shown off, is the feature rolling out to Chromebooks (via ComputerWorld) running the Dev Channel of Chrome OS.
Along with a number of announcements landing today during Adobe’s MAX conference, the company has quietly released an Adobe Creative Cloud app for Android in preview mode. The app, which works with the free 2GB Creative Cloud membership in addition to paid subscriptions, allows users to manage their Creative Cloud accounts by browsing and previewing files stored in the cloud service. The app was previously available for iOS users and sports a similar design.
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In the latest builds of Google’s Canary release channel of Chrome, there’s an interesting new feature popping up: the ability to press a single button to load a saved copy of a webpage you’ve previously visited. The feature surfaced less than a week after Google silently launched 64-bit versions of the Canary and Dev channels for Mac OS X.
This handy new feature can come in handy if you just need to quickly view a webpage and you’re finding yourself without a connection. But of course, you’ll only be able to view cached versions of webpages that are actually cached—you’ll need to have visited the page at some point prior. To try out the feature, you’ll need the Canary build of Chrome which can be downloaded here.
A beta update for the ridiculously popular WhatsApp messenger for Android has been released with official support for Android Wear, extending its wrist capabilities beyond just viewing and clearing notifications. Among the additions that are included in the update are stacked notifications, complete preview of received messages and, most importantly, the ability to reply to messages with voice.
A beta for Google Maps navigation is now available in El Salvador, Libya, Nicaragua, Paraguay, and Tunisia. While some countries may take this feature for granted, other territories don’t widely have access to this type of free software. For example, residents of North Korea have combined their efforts to produce a community developed version of Google Maps.
After adding 64-bit support for Chrome to its Canary and Developer channels for Windows users early last month, today Google gets one step closer to making the feature live for all as it adds support for Beta channel users. Features that hit Google beta release of Chrome are usually next promoted to the public, stable release of the browser.
The support comes for both Windows 7 and 8 users and will require the 64-bit installer on the Beta download page to install:
The Chrome Team is excited to announce the addition of the Chrome 64-bit Beta Channel for Windows 7 and 8 users. To try it out, download the 64-bit installer from our Beta download pages. The new version replaces the existing version while preserving all your settings and bookmarks, so there’s no need to uninstall a current installation of Chrome.
Google this morning announced the beta release of Chrome 37 on Android.
According to Google’s blog post about the new version, Chrome 37 will feature the new material design language shown off at Google I/O and most recently found on the updated Play Store that rolled out this week.
Google announced on Thursday afternoon that it has released Chrome 37 beta with a number of new developer features, making it easier to create richer and faster web content and apps. The beta release includes support for the DirectWrite API on Windows for high-quality text rendering, even on high DPI displays.
The release also adds an HTML element called <dialog> as one of its headline features, allowing for styled boxes that can be controlled with JavaScript. More than a half-dozen other improvements were also made.
The full changelog from the Chromium blog:
Other updates in this release
- The Web Cryptography JavaScript API is enabled by default starting in Chrome 37, allowing developers to perform cryptographic operations such as hashing, signature generation/verification, and encryption.
- Subpixel font scaling is now supported, which enables smooth animations of text between font sizes.
- TouchEvents are now longs instead of integers, enabling higher-fidelity touch interactions on high-DPI displays.
- CSS cursor values “zoom-in” and “zoom-out” are now unprefixed.
- The number of cores on a physical machine can now be accessed bynavigator.hardwareConcurrency.
- The user’s preferred languages are now accessible by navigator.languages, and the languagechange event is fired when this is updated.
- The CSS Shapes Module allows developers to define non-rectangular text wrapping boundaries around floated elements.
- NPAPI deprecation continues according to our previously-announced plan with a harder-to-bypass blocking UI.
- The default monospace font on Windows is now Consolas instead of Courier New.
The popular replacement Android keyboard Fleksy received an update to its publicly available beta version today that enabled support for 15 new languages. According to a press release announcing the update, the new languages and variants on existing languages include English (UK), Latin American Spanish, Hebrew, Romanian, French, Canadian, and more.
The beta now supports 37 languages total, and the company says it expects the update to exit beta this fall with support for over 40. An update was also released today for the Fleksy Messenger app for Gear smarwatches. The update introduces a few bug fixes and other enhancements, but also adds support for first-gen devices running Samsung’s Tizen operating system.
You can grab the Fleksy Android update from the beta website and the Gear update from the watch’s app store.
Google has officially introduced Linux support for Chrome Remote Desktop and provided step-by-step instructions to setup the beta through its Help Center. Linux already supported remote assistance login via PIN passwords, but now it gains long-awaited full remote desktop capabilities. Chrome Remote Desktop is also available for Windows, OS X, Chrome OS, Android and iOS devices.
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Yet another announcement from Google I/O today comes in the form of a new Gmail API beta that will make it easier for developers to integrate Gmail features into their apps:
While IMAP is great at what it was designed for (connecting email clients to email servers in a standard way), it wasn’t really designed to do all of the cool things that you have been working on, which is why this week at Google I/O, we’re launching the beta of the new Gmail API.
Designed to let you easily deliver Gmail-enabled features, this new API is a standard Google API, which gives RESTful access to a user’s mailbox under OAuth 2.0 authorization. It supports CRUD operations on true Gmail datatypes such as messages, threads, labels and drafts.
So what’s the benefit over IMAP or other solutions that developers have already been using to integrate Gmail features? Google says the new API, unlike IMAP, “gives fine-grained control to a user’s mailbox.” That means that an app, for example, “only needs to send mail on behalf of a user and does not need to read mail, you can limit your permission request to send-only.” There are also other benefits like speed:
To keep in sync, the API allows you to query the inbox change history, thereby avoiding the need to do “archaeology” to figure out what changed. Finally, a huge benefit is speed. While there’s still some tuning to be done (“beta” – remember?), results from our tests and feedback from pre-release developers suggest that the new Gmail API is delivering dramatic performance improvements over IMAP for web application use cases.
Following yesterday’s release of Chrome Beta 35 for the desktop, the Android beta started rolling out last night with a few notable new features that will soon be making their way to all users. In the beta, you can now “Undo Tab Close,” which means if you accidentally close a tab you’ll now be able to restore it. There are also improvements for multi-window devices, which we assume means tablets that support apps running side by side, as well as “fullscreen video with subtitles and HTML5 controls.”
Perhaps the most notable feature is initial support for Chromecasting videos. Google is making it easier to cast videos from Chrome for Android to the TV through its $35 Chromecast HDMI stick, but for now it’s not sharing a lot of details on what videos you can expect to work. It does note that “YouTube support for casting videos is not complete.”
You can expect these features to be rolling out for all users in the near future. Until then, you can try out the new features in the updated beta release.
Chromecast, Google’s $35 HDMI streaming stick, is about to support streaming of a lot more video content online as JW Player prepares to introduce support. Gigaom reports that the popular HTML5 and Flash video player that is used on millions of websites to host video content will announce today that it’s launching a beta of Chromecast support.
The company is also working on some interesting new features with its Chromecast implementation:
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Google has long had its cross-platform Chrome Remote Desktop extension that allows users to remotely access desktops on the network through the Chrome browser. We also already knew that it’s been working on solutions to bring the feature to Android and even iOS devices, but today we get what appears to be our first look Chrome Remote Desktop running on an Android device.
Droid-Life posted the screenshots below showing that it says is an invite only beta of the app that was released in the last few days. The app is apparently being developed for both smartphones and tablets, allowing users to remotely access desktop computers with the Chrome Remote Desktop client installed from the Chrome web store.
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Google has just promoted Chrome 34 to the beta channel, bringing with it a few new features and a lot of new apps/extension APIs for developers. Perhaps the most notable new feature for users on Mac, Windows, and Linux is hands-free Google Voice Search, allowing users to initiate a voice search on Google using the “Ok Google” command without the need of an extension:
While users have been able to download a browser extension for Chrome since November that allows them to activate a voice search with the “Ok Google” voice command (just like on Android), it the native feature without the need of the extension will land for all Chrome users soon. Here’s how to enable it:
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After making the Google Cast SDK public and launching a dedicated forum for Chromecast, Google has announced a public beta version of the Google Cast extension available in the Chrome Web Store.
The Google Cast extension allows users to beam content from a Chrome tab on their desktop to a Chromecast or other devices that support he Google Cast standard. Like Google’s beta versions of Chrome and other apps, the public beta release will provide devs and anyone else that downloads it to the latest features and APIs.
More info on the new beta is available from Google Developer Advocate Shawn Shen on Google+.
Google first introduced us to the new Google Maps back in May during Google I/O and since then users have been able to opt-in to a preview of the redesigned desktop Maps experience. Today, Google announced on its Maps blog that its officially bringing the redesigned app out of beta and making it available to all worldwide. Google said the new app will roll out over the coming weeks for all users.
Apart from a redesigned, streamlined UI, Google notes that the new Maps web app for desktop users includes smarter results for points of interest, improved directions with time and distance, real-time traffic reports, Street View previews, and a new “carousel” view for browsing 3D and Street View imagery.
If you had not previously opted into the Google Maps preview, you should start to see the new experience over the coming weeks.
