Author: Clinton

One of the hidden gems in Gmail are the labs.  The labs are unsupported, experimental features that may make their way into the mainstream support for the email service.  For the most part, I don’t recommend using beta or unsupported features but there is one that has been there a long time and Google seems to continue to improve it.

The feature is the ability to enable an unread message counter on the Gmail tab in the Chrome browser on Windows, MacOS or Linux as well as in Chrome OS.

Unread Counter in Gmail Tab in Chrome

In this How To, I’ll show you were to go in Gmail to enable the feature so you can try it out for yourself.

[Editors Note:  Due to the political nature of this post, comments have been disabled]

President Donald Trump’s first State of the Union Address will be streamed live on YouTube this week.  The address to both houses of Congress will happen on January 30th at 5:00 PM Eastern.  Google’s streaming service will be broadcasting the live stream from CBS News and will also be streaming the Democrat response to the address shortly after the President concludes his address.

The State of the Union Address is a Constitutionally mandated address Article II, Section 3, Clause 1.  That clause reads in part:  shall from time to time give to the Congress Information of the State of the Union, and recommend to their Consideration such measures as he shall judge necessary and expedient.

Yesterday we got a glimpse of the upcoming Samsung Galaxy S9 thanks to Evan Blass.  Now, once again thanks to him, you can now download the default wallpaper for the new device.

For those of you who aren’t interested, I’ve posted the wallpaper after the break.  If you want to download it, continue reading.

Thanks to the awesome Evan Blass, we now know what the upcoming Samsung Galaxy S9 and S9+ are going to look like nearly a month before they are officially announced at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona next month.

These are the Samsung Galaxy S9 and S9+ https://t.co/deXGg39m0d pic.twitter.com/RNGezrF4Bs

— Evan Blass (@evleaks) January 26, 2018

If you don’t follow the Venture Beat writer on Twitter, you should.  He is deadly accurate with information on upcoming devices in the Android world.  I don’t post a lot of leak or rumor information here on ClintonFitch.com because it can change – a lot.  But with Mr. Blass, I generally count it as solid information.

As Android app support continues to grow and develop in Chrome OS, a new commit suggest that it is about to get even better.  The new commit points to Android app being able to be resized while in split screen support.  Split screen support is is currently in the Dev channel and it will likely be a few months before we see it in the Stable channel.   This new feature would allow for resizing of the apps when you are in split screen mode.

With this new feature, you would be able to control the overall screen real estate that an Android app takes up on your Chromebook specifically when it is in tablet mode.  Right now, everything automatically gets kicked into full screen mode.

The Chrome OS Beta Channel has a second build that has been released to testers this month.  The new build is 64.0.3282.122 (Platform version: 10176.61.0) and it is available to most devices out there.  If you are already running the first beta of the month, you can type chrome://help and check for the update to this new build.

This new build is loaded with a lot of bug fixes, performance improvements and other tweaks as the Chromium team puts the final touches on getting this new build ready for the Stable channel.  You can read the entire change log here but the TL:DR version is bug fixes and security improvements.