Author: Clinton

Google has begun rolling out a feature Google Home visualization feature today, allowing you to ask Google Assistant to display the weather forecast on your Chromecast enabled device.  The new feature is a cloud-side change so there is nothing for you to do.  You will know when you have the feature on your account when you ask Assistant on your Google Home, “Hey Google, show me the weather on my Chromecast”.

Visualizations with Assistant and Home were shows last year at Google I/O as a way to improve getting personalized content.  In the case of the weather, you can visually see the weather forecast instead of having to listen to Assistant read it back to you on your device or Google Home.

With the release of the third build of Chrome 65 into the Chrome OS Dev channel, a new feature has popped up in settings that has big and positive implications for those who use their Chromebooks connected to an external monitor.  The new settings is enabled with a flag setting, chrome://flags/#enable-display-zoom-setting which enables the ability to change how scaling is done on external monitors.

Currently with a Chromebook, if you connect it to an external monitor, especially a high resolution monitor, you end up with having to scale the display to be able to read everything.  Usually this is 125% of normal to make things bigger and readable.  Doing this effectively changes the resolution to something lower, thus you lose screen real estate.

Google has released a new beta of Chrome for Android today in the Play Store.  The new build is version 65.0.3325.53, bringing the mobile browser up to the Chrome 65 version of the browser.  The build is mostly a bug fix and building upon the current stable build of the browser.

As the name suggests, this new build of Chrome for Android is beta and while anyone can get the beta from the Play Store, it is recommended that it not be your primary browser.  It can crash and there will likely still be bugs to be addressed.  If you can live with that however, and need to do some testing, give it a try.

In a move that caught many by surprise, Amazon has announced that they will be eliminating the lock screen ads on all of the current Prime phones and future phones will not have them.  On the current phones, there will be a firmware update that will eliminate the ads which should be released this week.

The move means that the company will be in compliance with Google’s new rules for Android that bans lock screen ads.  This is likely the reason for the dropping of the ads.  Amazon has reported that they plan to increase the price of the phones by $20 across the board which will likely go into effect after the patch to remove the ads has been released.

A small, incremental update to Chrome OS has been released that should be landing on everyone’s devices over the course of the next week or so.  The new version remains in the Chrome 64 train and is build 64.0.3282.144 (Platform version: 10176.68.0).

The release notes on this new build are pretty limited, indicating that it addresses several bug and security issues with the first Chrome 64 build released for Chrome OS earlier this month.  To check if the update is available for your system, type chrome://help in the browser bar and check for the update.  The release notes do indicate that systems with Android app support won’t see it for another few days yet.

Over the course of the next few days, a new version of Google+ will be rolling out to Android users.  While visually the app won’t look much different than it does today, Google’s Leo Deegan has taken to the community site to let everyone know what to expect.  Given he is the lead engineer of G+, he should know.

Though it very closely resembles the current app, this new version is the culmination of a complete rewrite of many core features using Google’s latest Android app infrastructure which will allow our Android team to build new features on a modern tech stack.

During the rewrite, we were able to build in some subtle updates. For instance, stream rendering and scrolling have been improved, the photo lightbox has been redesigned, comment options slide up from a bottom sheet, and grey-spammed comments are now viewable by post authors.

All of these changes point to a smoother experience overall with the community app.