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Help Google reunite a couple of cute hamsters in its latest Valentine’s Day Doodle
Check out the short, yet sweet game from Google
Google's been livening up its home page for decades with its now-famous Doodles, keeping us entertained, informing us about important events, and just generally making it a slightly more fun place to visit. In addition to static Doodles, we occasionally get to play around with a fun interactive one, and that's just the kind we're checking out today: Google’s latest Doodle is a little Valentine's game where you have to reunite two cute hamster lovers.
Google's latest Doodle is an ambitious (but pretty easy) RPG you can easily waste an hour on
And if you're blogging about it, that hour counts as 'research'
We're all familiar with Google's doodles, which appear on the Google.com homepage and up in the corner when using Search and are usually tied to specific events or holidays. Today Google announced a new one that some of us have probably seen winking from the corner with its pixel-art graphics, and it's a little different. Sure, sometimes these doodles have little games baked into them, but the new Doodle Champion Island Games is Google's biggest and most ambitious doodle to date: It's an RPG.
Google Photos introduces new doodle-y collage designs for showing off your pics
Populating your Recent Highlights
Google Photos is full of great memories constantly resurfacing in the Instagram Stories-like Recent Highlights that show up in the carousel at the top of your photos. The company has decided to tweak the collages consisting of multiple pictures that show up there with doodled backgrounds, making them more shareable on social media without further effort on your part.
Google is getting in the mood for a spooky Halloween
Doing its part to help celebrate a socially distant holiday
Halloween is right around the corner, and even if many of us won't celebrate the festivities the way we usually do, Google is trying to do its part to make the best of the situation with features that will help you have a socially distant Halloween. Like every year, the company has hidden a plethora of spooky surprises in its search engine and other products.
A few days ago, a new Labs section showed up in Google's search app on Android. In it, users are able to choose which upcoming features they want to enable and which ones they're not interested in. At first, only two options were there: Pinch to zoom on search results and Screenshot editing, sharing, and actions. Now, a third one has joined them: Search Widget Doodles.
Augmented Reality can be used for serious applications but also for fun. Besides taking photos with Captain America or inviting a panda into your living room, you can now bring your doodles to life and use them to add a bit of flair to your photos and videos thanks to a new app, DoodleLens. The concept is similar to Google's own Just a Line, but instead of scribbling on a screen, you can take your time to create more elaborate drawings on paper and apply several edits and animations to them.
Doodles are becoming one of the rare manifestations of Google's funky side. With the company becoming more serious and losing its witty approach to things, Doodles still remind us, from time to time, that there is still a playful child hiding inside that grown-up adult. But many Android users don't notice the genius behind the daily Doodle because they just use the search widget on their homescreen. Google has found a workaround for that.
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- Beyond reminding you to vote in the first place and helping you to find your local polling place, Google also reminds us about a few other tools it has to help voters engage in the democratic process.
It's election day in the United States and to mark the occasion, google.com has received a small but important tweak. 'Go Vote' is the simple message, as Google reminds its users of the importance of making your voice heard, regardless of who you support.
If you have an especially normal memory, you might be able to dig back far enough in your mind's history to last month, when news of a doodling, AI-powered camera was making the rounds. It was called Draw This, and the camera worked by visually recognizing objects in a scene, feeding those object names back into Google's "Quick, Draw!" dataset, and then placing them together in a similar configuration. The resulting photos were printed onto thermal paper, giving you an instant Polaroid-style doodle. Well, turns out all of us can enjoy those doodles for ourselves, as enterprising developer Eric Lu has turned it into a website called Cartoonify.
Google has been pumping out significant updates pretty fast recently, likely as the finishing touches are put down on new features that will be cut loose in a couple of weeks during I/O. The latest update brings with it the 'At a glance' widget that debuted in the Pixel Launcher, making it available to many more devices and in different launchers. We've also got a few small topics to cover in a teardown.
As the shopping season closes in, it's important to be running the latest versions of any apps that do run financial transactions. Android Pay just got a new update to version 1.35 and it looks a little more involved than performance enhancements. Among the live features, you can now long-press most text fields and barcodes to copy the contents into your clipboard. A teardown also shows that Android Pay may soon have notification channels, support for transit cards, and a new promotional game that puts you on a quest for Doodles.
Yesterday, NASA announced that it (along with international partners) had discovered seven Earth-size planets orbiting a single star. Even more importantly, three of them are located in the star's habitable zone, the range around a star where liquid water is possible. The solar system (named TRAPPIST-1) is unfortunately located 40 light-years away from Earth, so sending a probe or a person there isn't really possible for now.
Olympic Games. Rio de Janeiro. 2016. Right, now that we've hit all of the ridiculous trademarks claimed by the International Olympic Committee and the cease-and-desist letters are already on their way, we can talk about Google's latest Doodles. As explained on the official Search blog, the company's latest fanciful logo reinterpretations hide a selection of minigames, all of which are rather vaguely themed after the upcoming events in Rio.
Just last week Cody Toombs spotted the building blocks for a drawing function in Google's Keep notes app, and now it's live. The latest version of the APK, 3.2.435, makes it active and visible. You can wait for Google to get around to delivering it via the Play Store, or you can skip the line and download it from APK Mirror below.
The Humble people are on a roll. In addition to the Humble Bundle for PC and Android 11 announced just yesterday, they've launched a new Android-only bundle for cash-strapped gamers to enjoy. (You don't have to be cash-strapped, I suppose you might just be cheap and altruistic.) Bundle 8 includes seven games at the moment, with two being "above the average price" purchases and a third unlocking at a reasonable $5.
Although Facebook recently passed the 500 million download mark with their semi-detached Messenger app, it looks like they're not content to rest on their laurels. After adding full Android Wear support and video uploads to the app, Facebook's latest adjustment gives users the power to edit photos before sending them to chat contacts. Well, sort of - it's the kind of editing you can do with a Polaroid photo and a Sharpie marker.
Update Wednesday continues with yet another new apk. This time we're being treated to a regular version bump for Chrome Beta. The changelog isn't as dramatic as we've seen in previous updates to the browser, but it's hard to turn down improvements and bug fixes. The focus seems to be a little more on fine-tuning the experience as we should see smarter suggestions for text entry and improved text rendering on non-mobile optimized web sites. As a friendly bonus, Google's eclectic Doodles are coming back to the new tab page.
The social landscape of the 3rd millennium can be extremely confusing. Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Tumblr, texting, IM...it can all be a bit much. Sometimes you just want to get away from it all, go to a nice quiet place with someone you care about, curl up together and enjoy some nice alone time. Now, thanks to Pair, you can do that on the go! Pair is a social app that allows you to stay in contact with your significant other and no one else. Sorry, polygamists.
Chances are you're one of the everyone-on-the-planet who's played Words With Friends. Did you know there's other, shall we say, homages to classic board games available for your Android phone? For example, here we have Pictionary Draw Something, a turn-based, doodle-guessing game that you can play with friends wherever they are.