Tag: Google

Google Fit, Google’s fitness tracking app, has received a major update that brings an all-new user experience.  For all intents and purposes, the whole app looks completely new with far more detail on the main page of the app along with more granular historical data.  Gone is the large circular indicator of steps and exercise and replacing it is a cleaner UI with your active minutes, distance, calories burned and steps across the top of the page while more detailed information is found in sections below.  This information not only shows you which days of the week you hit your step count goal, but also your activity goal and a clean, easy-to-read graph of your weight with a trend line.

It has been rolling around in, erm, beta for a while now but the new Beta channel in the Google Play Store is now available to everyone.  The update on the back end and a recent update to the Play Store app on Android will now show you the beta apps that are available to you for the apps installed on your phone or tablet.  Generally it is only going to show you the beta programs you are involved in so don’t look for beta programs to join here.  Rather, it is simply a way for you to easily see which apps you are running beta code.

The latest update to Google Inbox is currently rolling out in the Google Play Store and with it comes Direct Share support.  For those who aren’t familiar with it, Direct Share is a feature in Marshmallow that allows your most frequently used contacts to show up in the Share pane of an app.  This is something that several apps have been rolling our recently including Google+, Whatsapp and Hangouts.  Now if you have Inbox installed and you want to share something (say a website), you can use the share function in your browser and share it directly to a contact using Inbox.

So if you are super paranoid about Google knowing everything about you, this post may not be good for your blood pressure.  If, however, you like being able to see your activity using Google products and services on any give day, the new My Activity site is for you.  And frankly, it is pretty darn cool.  For each day you can see a breakdown of the apps, services and other content that you have done on any given day.  It is literally a minute-by-minute breakdown.   You can see your search history, the website you have visited, the apps you have used, the YouTube videos you have viewed.  You get the idea:  If you give Google access to this information, it is in there in impressive detail.

Google Plus, the social and community site from the Mountain View company, celebrates its 5th birthday today.  The site and service was the 4th attempt by Google to bring forth a social networking site after Buzz, Friend Connect and Orkut all died.  Plus is by far the longest lived of any attempt into this arena by Google and over the course of 2014 and 2015, it looked like it too would end up on the digital trash heap.  But it hasn’t.  Google continues to tweak on it both on the web and in apps for Android and iOS.  It has evolved from a proper head-to-head competitor of Facebook and even Instagram to something different.  Sure it has the elements of those services but it is really more focused on community.  Within Google Plus you can easily find a community of like minded people on a whole range of subjects and interests.  You can create your own topic creations, your own communities and share them with everyone.  Not only is Google Plus surviving, you could make the argument that it is thriving.

A behind-the-scenes update and a new partnership with LyricFind has brought inline lyric viewing right within Google Search and Google Play Music on your Android phone.  The partnership with LyricFind brings lyrics to songs from over 4,000 publishers to the apps, making it much easier and smoother to find the words to your favorite song (and to figure out if you have been singing them wrong all these years!).

“We’re happy to expand the depth and quality of lyrics available on Google’s services,” says LyricFind CEO Darryl Ballantyne. “We’re working together to make lyrics available to a larger audience in a faster and more efficient way.”

LyricFind has been the main driver behind creating a legal and global lyric infrastructure for all platforms, and its partnership with Google further strengthens this mission. LyricFind collects new royalties for songwriters and rightsholders, and benefits music fans who engage more easily than ever with lyrics that inspire them.

Ultimate the good news for us Google users is that there is nothing we have to do to make the magic happen other than do a search.