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YouTube Music updates tablet UI, plans to base future improvements on user feedback
Now you'll be able to tell audiobooks from albums
Google continues to work on ensuring YouTube Music is a worthy successor to Google Play Music with added features and improvements. There is work to do, after all — despite its huge subscriber base, it's still considered a blah alternative to some of its big-name competitors. Recent UI tweaks have focused on overall usability and surfacing new content. In an update to the app's help page, the company also indicated more improvements are coming.
Most Android applications don't take advantage of the extra screen space on tablets, but not Apple Music. The latest beta release, version 2.7, officially adds support for Android tablets — among other improvements.
Chrome 70 was released on desktop platforms and Android earlier this month. Now it's time for Chromebooks to get the update, with a few added enhancements — like a new UI geared at tablet use and support for Android app shortcuts.
It's very rare to see Google improve the tablet experience on Android. As the Play Store arrives on more and more Chromebooks, perhaps someone at the company realized the app's tablet UI could use some tweaking. A new layout for app pages has been rolling out to users that adds a little more color.
Two frequently requested features were added with the release of the latest YouTube Music update. Version 2.06 brings with it the double-tap to seek feature from the main YouTube app, and perhaps just as importantly, it can now be installed to tablets directly from the Play Store and has a new tablet-oriented layout for the video player.
For years, Adobe Lightroom has been the editor of choice for photographers. As opposed to Photoshop, which is more designed for pixel-level editing and layered images, Lightroom is geared towards manipulating photos. It's non-destructive, meaning that any changes can be easily reversed, and all of your edits are kept in the app's catalog.
Opera Max isn't a browser, but it utilizes the company's well known data compression prowess to save you a lot of bandwidth and Megabytes, regardless of the app you're using to sip through your data. However, prior to today, Max was only optimized for phones and didn't work well, or at all, on tablets.
For a while now Microsoft developers have been working on adding handwriting support to the Android app. The feature, which appeared in the newly released beta app last month, lets users add notes in a way that is sometimes more convenient or useful than typing. Writers can use their fingertips or a stylus and then tweak their notes with a number of options. The feature is particularly useful for scribbling thoughts in the margins of a scanned document.
Pandora hasn't added any dramatic features to the music streaming app since the big interface change and Chromecast support, but they have been putting in small but noticeable changes on a pretty regular basis. Today's update to version 5.2 focuses on expanding some of the latest functionality to tablets and expanding the sleep timer and alarm clock.
Today Twitter has officially introduced the long-awaited tablet version of their Android app, and it should look pretty familiar. This UI was first leaked during the Samsung Unpacked event last month in Germany, but Twitter kept their lips sealed regarding the issue. Now the company is ready to show off their new Android tablet UI to the world, only you will still need a 2014 Galaxy Note 10.1 in order to use it.
Somewhere amid the rest of Google's app updates today, Google updated its Search app. While the Play Store still shows an old change log, there are at least a couple of notable changes with the new update.
doubleTwist is one of the most popular music players available for Android, and it's a rather attractive one to boot. It has large, finger-friendly icons, the standard grid-interface for browsing albums, and an overall dark theme that's easy on the eyes. Unfortunately, this look starts to fall apart when you fire up the app on a tablet, as it suffers from stretched-out-phone-UI syndrome. It's a disease that can afflict even the best Android apps, but doubleTwist has teased a new version of the app that has been completely cured.