Tag: App Update

The easy-to-use yet powerful photo editing app for Android, Snapseed, has been updated with several new features this week.  The updated build, version 2.8 for those keeping score at home, brings users the ability to add text to their photos in a wide range (dozens) of styles.  The new feature is listed under tools in the app and when you tap it, you will see a wide variety of styles to chose from for your text.  Once you type in your text (by tapping the text on your photo), you can move it around within the photo for effect or for location.  It’s quite powerful and certainly adds a nice touch to your photos.

The official Wikipedia app for Android has been updated in a big way, bringing a completely revamped user experience to the app.  The new home page for the app, the Explore feed, provides personalize and dynamic content to you.  It will show you top news stories, trending Wikipedia articles, suggestions to read and more.  It is pretty impressive and is a big departure from the somewhat static page the app had previously.

In addition to the new Explore feed in the Wikipedia app, voice integrated search is now in the app as well.  Now you tap the microphone icon in the search box and tell the app what you want to search for in Wikipedia.  The app leverages the voice recognition engine that is already built into your Android phone and leverages the Google APIs.  That means that you are getting the same accuracy that you do when you use “OK Google” on your phone.

If you have used Google Maps the last day or two and things look different, you aren’t imagining things.  The Maps team has been rolling out a significant update behind-the-scenes for the app for Android and the web that has a much improved color pallet and new highlight areas of interest on the maps.  The good thing is this update is all happening on Google’s end.  There is no app to update on your side.  As the improved maps roll out to all users, you will just see it on your account.

The biggest change is really around the color pallet and the removal of things like black lines around roads.  This makes viewing maps much easier and cleaner than the old maps.

The world is full of information, which means highlighting necessary info on the map without overcrowding it is a balancing act. So as part of this update, we’ve removed elements that aren’t absolutely required (like road outlines). The result is a cleaner look that makes it easier to see helpful and actionable information like traffic and transit. And we’ve improved the typography of street names, points of interest, transit stations, and more to make them more distinguishable from other things on the map, helping you navigate the world with fewer distractions.

In a practical sense, this means that viewing Google Maps will be easier on a lot of levels:  clearer text, less clutter and easier identification.

A new and exciting features for those who read comics in Google Play Books has begun rolling out to users.  The new Bubble Zoom feature is designed to make reading the speech bubbles in a comic book much easier by automatically zooming in on those bubbles as you view the comic page.

Using the same technology to recognize objects in photos, we trained our system to identify speech bubbles in comics. Bubble zoom expands the speech bubbles of a comic one-tap-at-a-time, making them super easy to read on your mobile device. It’s much easier to read digital comics one-handed as Bubble Zoom automatically identifies and expands each speech bubble for readability. No more compromising the full-page experience or getting lost while panning around.

The feature was announced last week at the San Diego Comic-Con as Google continues to push to be a leading comic book platform for readers.

The Microsoft Office suite of apps for Android – Excel, PowerPoint and Word – have all been updated today with several new features and improvements.  Perhaps the biggest new feature across all three apps is the ability to store your files on an SD card on your device.  To this point you could only save your files in your device’s main storage.  That can be problematic for those who do a lot of file editing on their devices, especially those with low storage devices.  This new feature, which is across all three apps, should help solve that problem.  There is nothing special you as a user have to do other than tell the apps to store on your SD card.  Your device, however, must be running Android Lollipop or later to take advantage of this feature. All three apps now also give you the ability to annotate files.  You can use a stylus or your finger to write, draw or highlight.  These new tools found in the Draw tab, a new tab in each app.

With Android Nougat now only weeks away from release, developers are starting to prepare their apps for support of the release.  Google is no exception and the latest update to their clock and alarm app, Google Clock, is squarely aimed at getting it ready for Nougat.  The update, which is in the Play Store now, also works on Lollipop and Marshmallow but a lot of the focus is on Nougat to be fair.  In fact, the first thing noted in the Release Notes is support for Nougat.  With that support comes support for multi-screen, the new feature that will come in the release that allows you to view more than one app at a time.  Google Clock will support that natively so you can setup timers or alarms while working on with another app.