Author: Clinton

eBay has become one of the latest apps to support the new app shortcuts in Android Nougat 7.1.  The update was release last week and most users will have it by now.  If you have a Nexus device or Pixel device that is running Nougat 7.1, you will be able to long press the app’s icon and quickly navigate to items you are following, selling or watching in the shopping site as well as a shortcut to search for things on eBay.

For those of you who don’t have Nougat 7.1, you can still take advantage of the app shortcuts in the eBay app (or any other that supports them) depending on your launcher.  Users of Action Launcher and Nova Launcher, which supports them, are good options to try if you are on an earlier version of Android.

Google Docs for Android had a nice update last week that brings more document editing power to the mobile app.  The update is still rolling out so it may be another day or two before you see it.  Once you do have it, you will find that you can now edit the headers and footers of your documents from within the app.  You can also now drag-and-drop text in a Docs file.

In addition to manipulating text, you can also manipulate images that you have inserted into your Docs file.  You can resize, rotate and move images within the file as well as adjust the text wrap around that image.

Google Contacts for the web has a new preview mode available that gives you a chance to try out the upcoming redesign of the site.  The option to view the new look is available in the menu pane when you navigate to contacts.google.com.  Just click on the preview link and you will be taken to the new look.  For those of you who use Google Contacts on your Android devices, this is going to look very familiar.

Gone is the spreadsheet-like list of contacts and it is replaced with a new Material Design with round avatars for your contacts.  This looks identical to the Android app and functionally, is the same.

Google Hangouts has an update rolling out for Android that is probably best described as a house cleaning release.  The update takes the messaging app to version 16 and cleans up contact lists and improves search within the app.  Contact lists in this update are more streamlined with the Contacts option in the menu now gone.  It has been removed from this part of the app as it was redundant to the Floating Action Button in your chat lists.  You can use that FAB to add a chat with any contact(s) so they are effectively listed there for you.

Search within Hangouts has also been improved around contacts.  Now when you tap the FAB to start a new conversation, when you start to type in the name of a contact, you will see four different lists:  Frequent, On Hangouts, Your Groups and Not on Hangouts.  The idea here is to quickly identify what communication paths are open for a contact so you can chose the best one for them.  For those who are not on Hangouts, you will see an “Invite” link by their name.

Google Maps has rolled out a new feature that gives you an idea of how difficult parking will be once you get to your destination.  The new feature is a behind-the-scenes update so if you have the latest build of the Maps apps installed, the new feature will appear in the metro areas in which it is enabled.

Factoring in time for parking can make or break a night out, let alone making it to that big meeting on time. So in 25 metro areas throughout the U.S., we’ve introduced a new parking difficulty icon in Google Maps for Android that’ll give you a heads up on what kind of parking crunch to prepare for when you’re on the go.

This should make sure that you are on time to that dinner reservation or meeting as it builds in some time for you to go park your vehicle.

Today’s Deal over at Amazon is on the powerful ASUS ZenFone Zoom.  This 5.5″ display device with a 13MP rear camera, 64GB of storage and unlocked phone is on sale today for $229.  That’s a savings of $170 from the normal $399 price.  For that price, this is a well spec’d phone.  It has an Intel 64-bit Quad-Core processor running at 2.3GHz and coupled with 4GB of RAM.  Storage wise it has 64GB of storage built-in but can be expanded an additional 128GB thanks to the MicroSD slot.

The ZenFone Zoom, as the name suggests, has a 13MP camera with a 3x optical zoom on the rear camera.  Optical zooms are not completely unique but they aren’t found often on phones.  Having an Optical zoom provides much crisper images over software zooming.  The front camera on the Zoom is a 5MP shooter.