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Until recently, only two notification levels were possible for Google+ communities and collections you're subscribed to: on or off. Thankfully, someone at Google has realized how frustrating it is to only get all notifications or none at all, and a new Highlights option has just been introduced.
A new version of Google+ is rolling out, but unlike many recent releases, this one has at least one immediately visible change after updating. The UI is taking on a whiter look for some of its key UI elements. A teardown also reveals that a Highlights section is coming back and will optionally make an appearance in notifications.
A few weeks ago, Google began rolling out a new Highlights feature for Inbox that promises to bring your most important email to the top of the list. Many people still don't have it, so this may only be available to a small group for initial testing, or perhaps the rollout is just progressing very slowly. A teardown of the latest update to Inbox includes signs that there is a new training tool that will be useful for making Highlights even better.
Back in the summer, Cody took an in-depth look at the latest update to Inbox by Gmail and found evidence for a new feature called Highlights. He found that Google was planning to introduce a section at the top of Inbox that would bring attention to priority emails. Now, it looks like the feature has been turned on by Google, for some people at least.
It's easy to underestimate the importance of the review process. When considering a purchase, we scour Amazon for well-written reviews, YouTube for thorough comparisons, and (obviously) Android Police for insightful hands-on articles. We do it for everything from smartphones to cars to vacuum cleaners. Sometimes we even enjoy reading reviews for things we don't want to buy, simply for our own amusement. So why do we generally ignore app reviews on Google Play?If I had to guess — and it isn't really much of a guess at all — I'd point my finger at the overwhelmingly poor quality of app reviews in general. The same is almost universally true for all app stores, but for Android in particular, users are petty, juvenile, or just plain vindictive, and, on average, reviews hardly give any sense of the quality of an app. Unless it makes up by being entertaining, bad reviews are simply a waste of everyone's time.Obviously, there are ways to counteract this, with the most obvious one being to float high-quality reviews to the top and bury poor ones at the bottom. Google has already been employing this for a few years now with some success, when it began sorting reviews by helpfulness instead of in reverse chronological order. How Google actually classifies the "helpfulness" of a review is somewhat of an unknown, and the algorithm could probably do with a few improvements.There are still countless measures that could be taken to improve the overall review experience (filtering by version number or increasing the character limit of reviews come to mind), and that's why virtually any news of Google experimenting with reviews is good news.We've received a tip from one of our regular readers that Google is running a limited test with review highlights on the Play Store. Review highlights provide a quick glance at what a majority of users are saying about a given app, thus giving potential installers a brief summary of what they can expect to see.
Twitter isn't particularly welcoming to newcomers, and the company knows this. It has long worked to help users discover which accounts to follow and how to turn their feeds into something interesting. Part of this effort has included churning out daily summaries called Highlights. Now it's making a move to keep you tapped into what's going on across the network and the world regardless of whom you follow.
Twitter can be intimidating to new users. The same can be said for experienced users. A timeline is only as good as the content you follow, and even then, you may miss the good bits over the course of a day unless you commit to scrolling through every single tweet.
After its update to 5.0 on iOS about a week ago, Pocket has been upgraded for Android as well. I'm a long-time user of Pocket, and while my use case is probably different from the typical user's (there are probably only about 10 items in my list at any given time), it's clear to me that Pocket is always trying to find new ways to make simple save-and-read functionality better and more convenient. To that end, Pocket's new update offers users a new "Highlights" selection, which will pull and organize the best stories from your list, placing them in categories like "quick reads," or sorting by source, trending status, or subject matter (like "#photography"). Pocket says that the highlights feature can learn and adapt to your habits in the app, making for better selections.
Just two short days ago, Samsung unveiled the massive Galaxy Note 2 at IFA in Berlin. They briefly showed off some new features of the Note II, like Air View and various note-taking and image editing tweaks. Still, this left anyone who may be interested in this next-gen phablet wanting more.
Google I/O Day 2 Keynote Is Live On YouTube - Need The Short Version? Day 1 & 2 Get The TL;DR Treatment, Too
Google's keynote address on day 2 of Google I/O was all Chrome, all day. Now that Chrome is the default browser for Android, combined with the company's
Google's keynote address on day 2 of Google I/O was all Chrome, all day. Now that Chrome is the default browser for Android, combined with the company's continued push behind Chrome OS, you can expect to see the browser everywhere from now on. Including in the hour-and-twenty-minute video below featuring all the new (and old) features and developments in Chrome.
March Madness officially begins tomorrow (March 13), and before all is said and done on April 2, a whopping 67 games will have been played. It's tough to keep up with the sheer number of games going on, but it just got a whole lot easier thanks to the fresh-on-the-market official app, NCAA March Madness Live.
Anticipating the fact that some folks prefer information presented to them visually, Google just dropped the first official promo video for the new Galaxy Nexus, powered by Ice Cream Sandwich. Tron-style racing and a rundown of new ICS features are practically begging you to click that Play button below:
Ahh, Google I/O, how we'll miss you for the next 365 days or so. The last 2 days have been filled with anticipation, knowledge, surprises, excitement, and fun - the perfect recipe for happy developers. As a developer myself, I've picked up heaps of new information, especially from the SDK Tools and ADT session by Tor Norbye and Xavier Ducrohet, and viewing the keynotes was simply a blast.
The first day of Google I/O 2011 is now over (see our highlights) - in fact, the next one is starting in mere 7 hours (4 hours of sleep - check). That doesn't mean, however, that the information presented was lost forever - on the contrary, Google has archived most, if not all, of the footage and made it available to you on YouTube via the GoogleDevelopers channel.