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Google’s Project Tango will be shut down on March 1, 2018 as the company turns their attention, and that of developers, to the software-only ARCore.  The news came from the Project Tango Twitter account where the Google team behind it thanked developers for their work over the past three years on the hardware-software Augmented Reality solution.

We’re turning down support for Tango on March 1, 2018. Thank you to our incredible community of developers who made such progress with Tango over the last three years. We look forward to continuing the journey with you on ARCore. https://t.co/aYiSUkgyie

— Tango (@projecttango) December 15, 2017

The news should not be shocking at this point for developers or consumers for that matter. Google has been clear over the course of 2017 that ARCore, which is now in Developer Preview 2, will be the company’s AR solution going forward.  It has a lot of benefits including being hardware independent.

Google Gboard, the keyboard app that is now native on a wide range of Android phones, has a big update rolling out this morning.  The update is version 6.8 for those keeping score but given the number of improvements and changes, this really feels like a major “dot oh” release.

The headline new feature for the app is Handwriting input support.  Now you can use a stylus or your finger to write instead of typing on the QWERTY keyboard.  Previously, to use handwriting input, you had to have a separate app.  If you are wanting to have this new input method in your install of Gboard, you will need to make sure you enable it.

To enable, open up the Gboard app settings and then tap on the Languages section.  At the bottom, tap the “Add Keyboard” button then tap on English (US).  The first option you see should be a Handwriting keyboard.  Select it then tap the Add button.  This will now make it an option on the keyboard.

Now to an app where you would type and you should see a globe icon on the keyboard next to the space button.  Tap that icon and you should alternate between your normal keyboard and the handwriting panel.

Blackberry has announced that the Blackberry PRIV, the first Android based device the company released two years ago, will no longer be seeing regular updates.  The news isn’t shocking and fits with what most manufactures, including Google, do when it comes to software updates.  Most only go out 24 months from release of the device.

For their part, Blackberry is doing their best to spin the news, indicating that they made the PRIV more secure out-of-the-box and it needed less patching anyway.  They also indicated that they will be providing updates should a critical security flaw be discovered and that warranty support is still provided.

For those of you who use the Chrome browser on your Windows PC, Mac or Linux machines, there is a new update rolling out for you today.  The new version is build 63.0.3239.108 and is a security update that addresses two security concerns with the browser.  The update keeps what has been the norm for Chrome in that a major release happens early in the month and a minor release happens in the middle to end of the month.

As you can see by the build number, this update remains in the Chrome 63 train.

Google hasn’t released full details of the fixes that are in this update but has outlined the one high priority item that was addressed was a security flaw while the second security issue was not addressed in the release notes.  Google tends to not release bug details until after a majority of users have been updated to assure that the exploit is not used.