Author: Clinton

While the growth rate of Chrome OS in the United States K-12 education sector has slowed, it is still the dominant platform according to the latest sales analysis from Futuresource.  The consulting firm released their quarterly K-12 market analysis and it points to Google’s platform holding a commanding 59.8% market share for the third quarter of this year.  That’s up 2% over the second quarter and is up 2.1% over 2016.

The numbers certainly show that the penetration of the platform into the K-12 market has slowed significantly, thanks both to market maturity as well as an influx of competition from both Apple and Microsoft.  Both companies have made strategic investments into getting a piece of the education pie in the US but both still have a long way to go.  Microsoft’s Windows platform is a distant 2nd place at 22.3% market share while Apple sits at 17% if you combine both MacOS and iOS.

Microsoft has launched an all new travel app named Outings.  The app was actually released last month by the Redmond company made no announcements about it so it went pretty much unnoticed.  That’s a shame because Outings is a really beautifully designed app.

The idea behind the app is simple:  You provide at least five topics of interest and the app will provide you suggestions for those interests.  The content is curated from various travel sites and blogs with outstanding information and photography for those locations.  Once you find one of interest, you can save it or you can indicate that you have been to that location.

For the first time in several months, the team over at LineageOS have released an update on their recent work and updates as well as a progress report on their Build 15 train for Android Oreo.

The bulk of the work that has been going on since their last update, which was way back in September, has been on maintenance and security updates for the Build 14.1 train (Android Nougat) and 13.0 (Android Marshmallow).  These have included fixes for the KRACK vulnerability, updating to the October & November security updates, new touchscreen gestures, and support for extended NFC.  There have also been updates to the Recorder and Gallery as well as an update to the battery icon in that time too.

For those of you who have an Android Wear 2.0 device, Android Oreo is coming to you.  Google has officially released the Oreo update for Wear, bringing with it several improvements and tweaks to the platform.  News of the release came from Googler Hoi Lam via Google+.

As for new features, here is the brief rundown:

• Notification vibration strength setting
• Touch lock option for wet conditions
• Support for 7 new countries / languages
• Notification channels
• Battery saving background limits

In other words, lots of the great features of Oreo now on your wrist.

Microsoft has released a new update to their OneDrive app for Android.  The update is version 5.1 for those keeping score at home and brings a refreshed UI to the cloud storage app.

With this update, Microsoft has finally moved away from the hamburger style menu and opted for a bottom, tab-style navigation.  This brings it more inline with other Microsoft apps as well as how Android apps look & feel in general.  These changes should help simplify navigation throughout the app.

Following the release of an updated Chrome for Android, the Chrome browser for Windows, MacOS and Linux has a new update rolling out today.  The updated version is build 63.0.3239.84 for those keeping score at home and gets desktop users of the browser on the Chrome 63 train.

Along with the updating to the base version of Chrome, this update also brings a lot of fixes.  There are 37 named fixes in this update but the details of exactly how it was fixed will remain confidential for a few more weeks.  This is a normal practice by Google to assure that users have had time to update and are not exposed to the vulnerability.  Most of the have to deal with spoofs or other exploits.

The Flags page in Chrome has been updated too.  Now if you type chrome://flags in the ominbar, you will see the new Material Design inspired look to these experimental settings in the browser.