08
Jan
play logo

If you fired up the web version of the Play Store today and everything felt a little off, don't panic. Google just decided to apply its Roboto font to all text on the site. Stock Android users will already be familiar with the typeface as the default setting for all written words on their Nexus devices. Outside of that family, though, it may be relatively unknown. Which is a shame, because it's beautiful.

2013-01-08_15h12_11

The new...

playstore

...and the old.

robotofont

That being said, in times past Roboto has not shown itself to be terribly versatile in scaling down to relatively low-ppi displays such as computer monitors and in this case it seems to work alright for headings, though to my eyes, some of the smaller text gets a little messy.

09
Aug
translatetiny

Google Translate, the frequently-overlooked wonder app of the 3rd millennium, got some new features today. Chief among them is an amazing new image-based translation mechanism. The app now supports use of your camera to take a picture of the text you would like to translate. Once that's done, just "brush" over the word or phrase you need to read and Translate will do what it says on the tin: render that text in your preferred language. It's not quite WordLens' live view, but then, if you've ever used WordLens' pause feature, you know that slowing things down a bit might actually be helpful.

26
Oct
image
Last Updated: November 8th, 2011

One of the features that really differentiates Android from other mobile operating systems is the ability to install a custom keyboard that works for you. I constantly keep jumping between a variety of keyboards as new updates come out (right now I've settled on SwiftKey due to its unparalleled prediction technology), but when some of our readers pointed out A.I.type Keyboard's "psychic" word completion, I had to check it out.

However, what I found in A.I. Keyboard's Market description prevented me from even installing it - all smart predictions happen in the cloud, which means everything you type (or almost everything) gets sent over the data connection to their servers.

10
Mar
snap20110310_174630

Even though SwiftKey has always been my favorite keyboard in theory, I've never been able to truly make the move from the HTC keyboard on my EVO to it for one reason - it didn't have arrow keys exposed on the main screen. Prediction was also about the same - sometimes worse, sometimes better, so I stuck with the HTC stock offering, giving SwiftKey's new versions a try here and there.

Everything changed with the new beta that was just sent to VIP members (if you are one of them, you can grab the download link from here). Not only is the new prediction engine much better than before, but there is finally a checkbox in the options for arrow keys that users without trackballs need so badly.