Author: Clinton

Today will be my final “day in the office” for 2017 and this post is the final one for the year.

And what a year it has been.

I cannot thank you enough for all the support and visits you have made to the site over the course of the past 12 months.  2017 marks the 14th year that ClintonFitch.com has existed in some form or fashion with the past 5 years focused on Android and Chrome OS.  It will go down as one of the best years ever.

In total, 952 articles were posted on the site this year and more unique visitors came to the site in 2017 than ever.  Compared to 2016, this year saw a 37% increase in overall visitors.  Thank you, thank you, thank you!

The sleep tracking app Sleep as Android has a major update rolling out today that brings a number of new features along with several improvements and fixes.  The new build is version 20171223 and should come to all users of the app over the course of the next few days.

This update brings support for a new time-based theme to the app which will be the traditional dark theme until sunrise where it turns to a light theme automatically.  You’ll also see that the sleep charts have been improved for easier reading and clarity of information.  In fact most of the app has had some type of face lift in this update.

For those that aren’t familiar with Sleep as Android, it is an app that allows you to track your overall sleep and the quality of that sleep using your Android phone or Android Wear device.  It is an app that I use daily and highly recommend for those who want to keep tabs on their sleeping patterns in this hectic world of ours.  You can read my review of it here in case you missed it.

Following in the footsteps of Verizon from last week, T-Mobile has released the Android Oreo update for the Moto Z2 Force on their network.  The update, which is just shy of 1GB in size, brings all of the goodness of Oreo to the 2017 flagship device as well as the December Android Security Update.  The new build, like Verizon, is ODX27.

With the size of this update, you will need to download it via WiFi and will need to have 80% battery life on your phone before you can install it.  The install process will take about 10-15 minutes after it is downloaded.

Today’s Deal is on the new Samsung Chromebook Plus.  The 12.3″ convertible has been selling for $450 but is down to $409 right now on Amazon.  That will get you one of the latest Chromebooks available and it will run Android apps natively right out of the box.

The Chromebook Plus has a 12.3″ display rendering at 2400 x 1600.  It is also a touchscreen which makes using the included stylus or your finger for apps easier.  It has 4GB of RAM, 32GB of Storage and you can expand that storage thanks to the MicroSD slot.  It has dual-microphones, a 720p Webcam and, of course, Wi-Fi.  It only ways 2.4 lbs so it is designed for portability and with it being able to be be used as a laptop or a slate, you have a lot of flexibility in where and how you use this Chromebook.

With many of us spending hours a day looking at computer displays, eye strain is a real problem for many.  This is particularly true late at night or early in the morning when we tend to view these screens in low light situations.  If the screen is to bright or has too much blue, it can cause eye strain.  To combat this, developers have rolled out a feature named Night Light.

Night Light essentially filters out the blue light in a display, turning it a warm sepia color, which reduces eye strain.  While Google has introduced this in Android, up until recently it wasn’t even an option in Chrome OS.

The feature made its way into the beta builds of Chrome 60 back in September but it wasn’t until Chrome 62 that it made it to the Stable channel.  Now, in Chrome 63, you still have to enable it manually to make it an option that is available to you on your Chromebook.  In this How To, I’ll show you where to find it and how to enable Night Light on your Chromebook.  I’ll also show you how to configure it to where it automatically turns on at a particular time each day.

If you are a Chromebook users that uses Android apps, Chrome 64 is likely going to bring you some very good news.  The beta of that train is out and in it, Android apps continue to run when they are in the background.  Currently the apps will pause (with a few exceptions) when they are no longer the focus app on your Chromebook.  That is, if you move from one app to another or from an app to a web-based app in Chrome, the app will pause.

Chrome 64 addresses this primarily through an update to the Android Framework running in Chrome OS.  Way back in March, I posted that this framework would be upgraded from Android Marshmallow to Android Nougat.  It was in Chrome 61 but it didn’t work well as apps continued to pause in the background.  With Chrome 64, the framework is updated to Android Oreo and, based on early beta testing, is able to handle multiple Android apps running at the same time without pausing them when they are not the primary focus app.