For those of you on Project Fi, there is a great new addition to the service’s website. Now you can see your call and text history right on the site, including if the call or text was an inbound or outbound communication. The update came yesterday to the site and while there is no word on if this will make it into the Fi app itself, you can at least for now, go to the web and check out the details.
In what has become a pretty regular trend, Google has released an updated version of a standard app that is now standalone. Google Calculator is hitting the Google Play Store today as an independent-of-the-OS app, following apps such as Google Messenger and Google Calendar as apps who have made the same migration. The news, for users, is great because it means that you can get updates for the app without having to wait for general Android updates. I wrote about this in detail back in July of last year and how moving apps from embedded to standalone is a benefit not only to users but to Google themselves and manufactures.
The 2016 Major League Baseball season is just a couple of weeks away from starting with the hopes and dreams of players and fans refreshed once again for a long season. Baseball has been played professionally for 147 years and while Android and mobile apps haven’t been around nearly that long, the powers that be at MLB have built arguably one of the best sports league apps available today. MLB At Bat is simply a requirement for baseball fans to follow the league and their favorite team. With a wealth of information available for free in the app, the subscription service adds even more content including live audio broadcasts, pitching and even a Game of the Week to watch without requiring an MLB.TV subscription. If you are a baseball fan, do yourself a favor and download MLB At Bat. You won’t regret it.
Microsoft’s lock screen app, Next Lock Screen, has seen an update today that brings several bug fixes along with several new features to the app. If you aren’t familiar with Next Lock Screen, it is a lock screen app that provides you notifications, calendar updates and now an app usage aware quick launchpad all from your lock screen. It is actually a very informative and elegant lock screen app that gives you a good amount of information without having to actually unlock your device. So why use a lock screen app like this instead of the Android built-in lock screen? Mainly so you can get more customized information.
Microsoft has released updates to their suite of Office apps for Android, bringing several new features to each of the apps. The updates are for Excel, PowerPoint and Word and while some features are unique to each app, there are some common improvements across all of them. One of those is the ability to send a file to someone as a PDF. Before this update, you were not able to share a file in any other format than the native Office format. Now when you go to share a file as an attachment, you can still do that or you can send it as a PDF.
Google Photos for Android has been updated with a much needed and welcomed change around photo editing. The changes are found in version 1.17 of the app, which is currently rolling out to the Google Play Store and devices. The update brings what is commonly considered “non-destructive” photo editing. It means that your original photo is stored along with the edited version in one file and if you want to go back to your original photo, you simply undo the edits. This behavior is quite common in other photo editing apps but, until now, was not in Google Photos.
A friendly reminder for those of you who use the Chrome browser on older versions of Windows or OS X that starting 1st April they will no longer be supported. I posted on this announcement back in November when Google outlined that they would no longer be supporting older versions of the Operating Systems due in part to the fact that Microsoft and Apple have stopped supporting these legacy versions of the OS too.
If you are using the Chrome Browser on your Windows, Mac or Linux PC, there is a new and important update out for you. The update addresses five critical security issues that have been fixed and all users are encouraged to update to the latest version. The build you are looking for is 49.0.2623.108 and you can see what version you have and get the update downloaded to your device by going to chrome://help in the browser and it will automatically start downloading the update for you. Once it is downloaded, you will need to restart the browser for the changes to take effect (but not reboot your computer).