Tag: Microsoft

Microsoft has rolled out yet another new app for Android today that brings quick and easy copying of text from one app to another.  Clip Layer allows you to copy a page or section of text from one app by pressing and holding the Home button on your phone, then opening another app and copying that text to that app.  While Android natively has the ability to do this on most apps, Clip Layer makes it very easy with just simple taps to copy sections of text instead of having to tap-and-drag.  Plus, the app has the ability to take that copied text and share it with others right from within the app.

The magic of how the app works is within the Assistant settings of Android.  By allowing the app to become your Device Assistance app, that enabled the Home button to become the trigger for copying text.

Microsoft has pushed an update out for the OneDrive app for Android and it has some great new features.  The banner update is the improved sorting options.  Previously you had basically one sort option which was alphabetical.  Now you have a slew of sorting options available to make finding that file much easier and faster.  The new sorting options include:

• A-Z
• Z-A
• Newest files or folders
• Oldest files or folders
• Largest files or folders
• Smallest files or folders

It is likely that if you have a lot of files in OneDrive that the newest file sort option will be the most appreciated as you can find all those files you were working on instead of having to hunt around for it.

Microsoft has begun rolling out a nice update to OneNote, bringing several fixes along with some key updates for those with accessibilities needs.  In the update, users can now have alternative text on images and embedded files in a page.  That means for those who cannot see images, they can have alternative text which can be read to them by recognition software.  This has been a common practice in web design for many years (in fact, every image on ClintonFitch.com has alternative text) and it is good to see it come to a productivity app like OneNote for those who need it.

That’s not the only change of course.  There is now the ability to view images outside of OneNote itself.  Now when you tap on an image in a note, you can choose to open that in another app to view that image.  To this point, once you embedded an image, you had to view it within OneNote.  Also, related to this, you can view embedded files outside of OneNote too.

Microsoft is rolling out a nice update to their lock screen app, Next Lock Screen, that brings a lot of improvements to the app.  The biggest new feature in the app, which is now up to version 3.10.3 for those keeping score, is the expansion of fingerprint scanner support to a much wider range of Android phones.  The support for fingerprint scanners has been in the app for a few months now but it was very limited on the number of devices that it would work on.  Indeed most people didn’t even know it was there in the app.  This update greatly expands the number of devices that can now use the scanner to unlock the phone.  In testing it this morning, it works on my Nexus 6P and my Nextbit Robin, two devices that were not supported in the previous release.

Some eleven months after it was made available for iOS users, Microsoft Selfie has finally hit the Google Play Store for Android devices.  The app is aimed at giving you some filtering options for photos you take with the app or selfies that you have in your camera roll.  While the selfie camera app-meets-filter app is not something new, this app does a pretty good job.  With each filter in the app you can adjust the intensity and there are 12 different filters that you can apply to your photos.  There is also a preview button that you can tap and hold to see the photo with and without the applied filter.

Microsoft has started rolling out an update to PowerPoint for Android that has a new Shape Recognition feature.  The update now gives you the option to have the app recognize any shape you draw with your finger or stylus in free form and snap that into a perfect version of that shape.  So, for example, if you draw a square, with this feature enabled, you will get a perfectly formed square on your slide instead of your free form version.  You can, of course, not enable this, but it is super handy and is something that until now hasn’t been in the mobile version of the app.