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The 5 top Flourish tips and tricks for perfect data visualizations
Flourish does a lot more than make your data look good
Flourish is a powerful data visualization tool that helps analysts and content creators produce effective visualizations for all devices. And since Flourish runs in your browser, you don't need a souped-up laptop to use it. A good Chromebook is more than enough to run the application. It's also a tool that, like Google Pinpoint, is useful for journalists. However, not all of the tool's features are immediately apparent. So, here's a list of tips and tricks to help you get the most out of this versatile tool.
What is the Google Common Knowledge Project?
An easy way to find reliable and trustworthy local community data
Many of us visit the Google search engine daily to find answers to our questions and gather information for independent research. And in a world powered by mobile devices, the best Android phones allow us to access this vast knowledge database anytime we need it. In our quest to find the relevant information we seek, we often visit multiple websites and decide just how accurate their claims are. Worse yet, finding specific data points on a hard-to-research topic can take time and effort, often not giving you the results you were likely hoping for.
Spotify's new site charts top songs in more categories than we know what to do with
If you can't find something you like in here, you're out of luck
Spotify users have long been able to browse playlists of top songs, but what if you were looking for even more information about the latest trending tunes? Last year Spotify announced new Twitter and Instagram accounts called Spotify Charts to share its top music streams for the week, both in the US and around the world. Now Spotify is launching a new website “to go deep on all the data and see what music is moving listeners around the world” as a massive expansion to Charts.
Google Sheet's latest visual tweaks are the closest spreadsheets can probably get to being sexy
That line is thick — literally, like 8px
Although it might not be as powerful as Excel, Google Sheets has proven itself a capable spreadsheet tool since its launch. Whether you're putting together an expense chart or just trying to balance your monthly budget, it's a great free alternative to Microsoft's legacy data software. With Google's latest update to Sheets, users can find new options for customizing their charts with all-new designs.
Spotify app lets you search for songs by lyrics
The company will also publish new weekly music charts to Twitter
The Spotify apps for Android and iOS have recently picked up a new feature: The ability to search for music through song lyrics. We don't know precisely when it rolled out, but an informal announcement made by Spotify's Lin Wang implies it landed recently. Separately, Spotify has also announced that it will start publishing new music charts, including a weekly top 50, a US top 10, and a Global top 10, with other market-specific versions planned soon.
YouTube Music is testing charts in the Explore tab
Another Google Play Music feature getting a more prominent place in the newer streaming service
For a long time, YouTube Music featured a near useless Hotlist tab that collected a few trending music videos you may or may not care for. The developers have long replaced it with the much better Explore section that gives you a personalized selection of new albums and singles, playlists, genres and moods, and more. This experience is in for a small facelift some Redditors have spotted: Apart from a slightly revised design, the new page now features charts for them.
For a while now, App Annie has been offering its metrics to interested parties so developers can better understand their place in the app economy. Careful examination and integration of data like this, paired with the knowledge of a target audience, can influence where a developer's time can be best spent. And according to App Annie's latest report, Play Store downloads are up significantly, with a 20% rise year-over-year, and 160% higher than Apple's Play Store. On the other hand, consumer spending is still 80% higher on iOS.
I get it - spreadsheets aren't the most exciting thing in the world. Still, Google has continued to improve the mobile and desktop apps, most recently adding text rotation and other formatting features to the Android app. Now the company has added a few major improvements to Sheets, starting with some machine learning magic.
Embedding charts into a document is one of those basic office app functions that you take for granted. It's important that you can do it, but you may not see an obvious way embedding charts could be improved. Google did, though: rather than re-embedding every time the underlying data changes—which would require deleting the old embed and adding the replacement—you can now just click a button to refresh the chart.
If you haven't had Google turn your spreadsheet into a chart before, go to the overflow menu and tap Explore. It's this nifty part of the app that's getting attention in the latest update.
Google is keeping up its fast pace of updates to its office productivity apps, this time with meaningful improvements to both Slides and Sheets for Android. Building on existing presentation abilities, Slides gets notification forward/back toggles as well as an option to watch your audience while presenting to a Hangouts call. Sheets now gives Android users the option to easily edit charts, which were basically view-only previously.
Google's rolling out an AdSense update for its Android app that should provide a better experience for monitoring your revenue stream on the go. Version 2.0 introduces an enhanced interface, one that presents new information in a more visual manner. And don't worry, the widget introduced in the last release is still intact.
The Developer Economics 2013 report—a sort of State of the Union on app development—is out and it's packed with helpful tidbits, both for armchair analysts and programmers trying to make some sense out of this crazy software world. One of the most interesting observations the survey showed is there is still demand for a third platform. And right now they're getting it in a surprising place: on Blackberries.
Google has once again updated the Android platform distribution numbers. The numbers, released right on schedule today, show Gingerbread still leading the pack at 56% of devices (down from 57.5% last month), with Jelly Bean crawling up the ladder to 1.8%, up from 1.2% last time.
Pop quiz: How long does it take for a new version of Android to be widely adopted? A new version of Android comes out, AOSP updates, OEMs adapt it to a myriad of devices, and carriers test the updates. That process. How long does it take?
Just when you thought Quickoffice was becoming out of touch with its user base (specifically, with their wallets) the company has released a fairly major update to its two main Android apps.