Author: Clinton

For those of you who don’t live in the US, you may have heard we are in an election year.  For those of you who live in the US, it has been one of the most hotly contested pre-election cycles in quite some time.  For those of you who use the Google Now launcher, primary and caucus results have been readily available for the past few weeks as these events leading up to the Democratic and Republican conventions this summer and the Presidential election in November.  Part of that process to get the nomination of either party is to secure enough delegates from the states (thanks to your results in the primaries or caucus’ in those states) to get the nomination.  With “Super Tuesday” now complete and the delegates picture more clear, Google Now is starting to show the delegates standings.

Google has begun a limited roll out of their new apps and service, Hands Free.  The testing area is limited to a select number of retailers and for those who live or work in the South Bay area, just south of San Francisco, California.  Generally it covers Mountain View, Sunnyvale, San Jose and Palo Alto.  The idea, as the name suggests, is that you can complete a purchase completely hands free – no phone or smartwatch in your hand or on your wrist required.  The app utilizes Bluetooth to communicate between the point-of-sale terminal and your phone in your pocket.

The roadmap of when Samsung is going to be releasing their Android Marshmallow updates to devices has been leaked, again, with some revised or clarified dates.  Phone Arena first posted on this earlier today and the news is good for those who have a wide range of Samsung phones from the past couple of years.  While the leak is by no means a 100% confirmation, it is an indicator of where they company is on development and which devices are going to see the update eventually.

One of the challenges of working with spreadsheets is if you want to import text into that spreadsheet from another document.  Often times it is imported with no problem but getting it organized into columns can be a painful experience.  The Google Docs team is trying to make that process a bit easier with an update they have introduced to Google Sheets online.  Now when you import text, you can highlight the columns you want to separate the text to in your spreadsheet thanks to a new “split text to columns” option.

Following the move by T-Mobile, AT&T has also started shipping the new Samsung Galaxy S7 and Galaxy S7 Edge to customers who pre-ordered the flagship devices.  AT&T customers who placed their order for one of the devices are reporting that they have received shipping notices and devices this week.  T-Mobile was the first to do this with the new S7’s, with shipping notices going out on Monday of this week and some customers receiving the devices already.

This evening I have pushed out an update to the ClintonFitch.com app to the Google Play Store.  The updated version is build 5.0.0 for those keeping score at home and is the first major tweak to the UI since I launched the app back in January.  Now when you open up the app, all of the articles are in a card format instead of a list format.  This makes viewing a bit easier and significantly reduces the amount of scrolling you have to do to get to older posts.  This should make things a bit easier for those of you who have the app loaded on a tablet or large screen phone.