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How to create your own games with today's Google Doodle
Today's Google Doodle celebrates Jerry Lawson, the inventor of the videogame cartridge
The first Google Doodle this month celebrates the 82nd birthday of Gerald "Jerry" Lawson, the inventor of the game cartridge. While his creations never became commercial successes, the ideas he pioneered were used by companies like Atari to great success.
Take a crack at this playable Google Doodle and see if you can win at pétanque
Bocce, pétanque, tomayto, tomahto
A lot of cultures have this particular game where you aim and launch stones to try and get them as close to a target as possible while trying to block your opponent's stones from doing the same. You might be familiar with bocce, lawn bowling, or even curling, but in France, they call it pétanque and an upcoming Google Doodle lets us play a game or two. Or, uh, twenty-three. Look, TikTok isn't for me, okay?
Google Discover will get a major theming overhaul in Android 12
Google Doodles spread their background color down the feed
Google is focusing on the visual experience of Android 12. The latest fruit of that endeavor is a bit of fresh paint on the Discover feed. Google Doodles, the little shifting variations on the Google logo, have appeared at the top of the feed for a while now. But with the latest version of Google search installed on Android 12, Doodles now theme the background of the feed itself. Neat.
Google likes to mark occasions with search Easter eggs (like the Thanos gag for the release of Avengers: Endgame a couple months back) and doodles, and for the Fourth of July this year, it's done both. Searching "fireworks" will fill your screen with a light show, and a baseball-themed Google doodle leads to a fun minigame.
Unless you've been living under a rock in recent weeks, you may have heard about some soccer thing that's happening soon (football, to those of us this side of the Atlantic). The 2018 FIFA World Cup is almost upon us, and Google has some tricks up its sleeve to assist fans around the globe. As the tournament kicks off with Russia vs Saudi Arabia next Thursday, new features in the Google app will help you keep up with all the action. Other Google products will also be on hand to improve the experience, including Assistant, News, Trends, and Maps.
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.
Although the Google.com domain name was registered on September 15, 1997 and it technically celebrated its 20th birthday a couple of weeks ago, Google likes to celebrate its birthday closer to when the company officially launched. And for the past years, it's sort of chosen September 27 as its birthday. You may notice that today is actually September 28, but we were overwhelmed with plenty of news yesterday and had to miss the birthday party. I'm sure Google doesn't mind. After all, it's old enough now to go celebrate with its buddies and leave us all alone with its freshly baked favorite cake and memories of when it was young and would beg us to help it blow the candles.