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Google Assistant can now find your iPhone
Plus "new" Routine features and Duplex-powered takeout order billing autofill
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Google has just announced four "new" features for the Google Assistant, including some new Routine functionality, the ability to pay for takeout orders via a little Duplex magic, and a feature for lost iPhones. As usual, some of these are new-new, others are things Google's been silently testing for a while and which many of our readers may have already been using for some time.
Android 11 can automatically enable dark theme at certain times or sunset
Something that Samsung's One UI could do two years ago
The first developer preview of Android 11 is finally out, and now that there are OTA images we can flash to devices, we're starting to discover more features than what Google mentioned in the official announcement. One of those hidden features is a scheduled mode for dark theme, something that was strangely missing from last year's Android 10 release.
Some of the updates seeping out from the Pixel 3 have been pretty innocuous while others are quite significant. The Clock update leans toward the innocuous side as it brings some subtle but pleasing visual changes to its interface. A teardown also turns up part of the sunrise feature that was announced earlier today.
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- That reprieve didn't last long. Sunrise is now officially done. The team shared the news on its site explaining that any changes you make to Sunrise will not be reflected to your services and everyone will be logged out of their account in a matter of hours. Your calendar info is safe on whichever account you had been using with Sunrise. The app's beloved features now live on as part of the updated Outlook.
The popular calendar app Sunrise was supposed to shut down permanently yesterday, but that didn't happen. Microsoft now says it has decided to hold off on killing Sunrise while it works to integrate more Sunrise features into the Outlook app. That doesn't mean Sunrise is alive and well, but it's not dead at least.
Microsoft has announced a series of upgrades to the calendar portion of the mobile version of Outlook. These are mostly borrowed features from the now-defunct Sunrise Calendar, which Microsoft acquired over 18 months ago.
A wave of dread washed over fans of Sunrise Calendar when it was acquired my Microsoft in 2015, and indeed that dread was justified. Microsoft ended update support for Sunrise in late 2015, and now we know when the app will shut down for good. The big day is August 31st, so you'll have to find an alternative before then.
In a move that isn't all that surprising, Sunrise Calendar now offers full support for Office 365 accounts. Considering that Microsoft bought Sunrise a few months ago, it was no great leap to expect better integration into that ecosystem. We already saw Wunderlist support added shortly after Microsoft bought them, too. Office 365 joins a hefty list of providers you can use with Sunrise.
Let's be honest here: you really don't give a crap about Arbor Day. But if you forget to record the season finale of The Flash, you're going to be out three bucks for a Google Play episode purchase. To help alleviate this first-world problem, Microsoft subsidiary Sunrise Calendar has added hundreds of TV shows across dozens of networks to its "Interesting Calendars" feature, allowing for quick and easy TV scheduling on top of its usual handy interface.
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- It's now double official. Microsoft announced the acquisition on its official blog, neglecting to mention exactly what would happen to the existing app as the team transitions to a new company. Sunrise has confirmed the same thing on their own website.
Last week the scuttlebutt around the strangely popular world of tech corporate acquisitions was that Microsoft had purchased Sunrise Calendar, a good-looking and well-received alternative to built-in calendar apps on Android and iOS. Today Microsoft has stated that yes indeed, they bought it, though they haven't confirmed the reported $100 million dollar price tag. The confirmation came in the form of a YouTube video that has oddly been set to private, but various news outlets including VentureBeat got a look at it before it went dark.
Like any company out there, Microsoft wants you to use its products. In those cases when you choose not to, it reserves the right to buy whatever it is that you actually are using. That way you're happy and you're still using Microsoft's stuff. Everybody wins, in a way.
There is no shortage of calendar apps for Android, each of which is looking for a way to set itself apart from the crowd. Lately I've settled in with Sunrise Calendar as my go-to, as it's just easy to use and provides all the features I want in a calendar. And it just got a little bit better.
Sunrise, a thoughtfully-designed calendar app that only recently made the jump from iOS to Android, got a bump up to version 1.1.0 today, bringing with it new integration for a variety of services including Songkick, Tripit, Evernote, Github, and Asana. Basically, this integration provides syncing between the services and Sunrise, where the calendar app can grab reminders from Evernote automatically, your Tripit plans and trips will automatically populate, Songkick concerts will show up like magic, and Github or Asana changes will be synced (in both directions).