Adding a bunch of nonsense into a writing assignment to meet the minimum word requirement is no doubt an experience that many of you have endured. Docs is a great word processor overall, and it's an even better one now that Google has just added a live word count.
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Google Photos uses AI sorcery to do all kinds of cool stuff, and starting this week, the service is getting another new trick on Android: it'll soon offer to adjust photos of documents, presenting one-tap options to rotate, crop, and adjust color balance to make them more legible.
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Easy collaboration is a key strength of Google Drive, allowing multiple users to view, comment on, and suggests edits to documents. Until now, it's only been possible to share a Doc, Sheet, or Slide with someone who has a Google account. A new Drive beta feature is going to change that.
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This March reports broke that Facebook had been gathering call, SMS, and MMS metadata from Android app users for years with questionable levels of consent. Ars Technica suggested that Facebook was exploiting a loophole in Android to harvest call and SMS data without requesting the permission from users. Facebook responded that it was only collecting metadata through Facebook Lite and Messenger, both of which ask users for that permission during setup. The platform's integrity, however, has now been brought into question once more with revelations from internal emails released by the UK Parliament that show employees explicitly discussing how they might avoid any Android permissions request when accessing SMS and call history.
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There are a number of useful scanning apps on the Play Store that allow you to take photos of documents and turn them into digital copies. In fact, I wonder if proper scanners are even still sold anymore, such is the ease with which their purpose can now be fulfilled by a smartphone. Adobe Scan is one of the most popular examples of such an app, and its latest update makes it more powerful than ever.
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Given the fast rate at which WhatsApp betas are rolling lately, we keep getting frequent tips about certain small changes to the app that have occurred over one of the many revisions but that we can't pinpoint to a specific version of the app (unless we go ahead and install and test each version, but ain't nobody got time for that!!!). So here we are today with a list of changes that have been implemented at some point during the past week or two and that are all available in version 2.12.535 of the app.
First, you can now format text inside WhatsApp messages as bold or italics.
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The signs have been here for months for WhatsApp's support of document sharing, but the feature has just started rolling out to users over the past several hours. It doesn't seem like the option is baked into a specific version of WhatsApp since we've seen users from 2.12.453 (official Play Store release) to the latest 2.12.493 (beta) reporting it suddenly becoming available to them, while others still don't have it. Odds are it's a server-side trigger that's spreading the feature, and at a very fast pace according to the tips in our inboxes.
So how does WhatsApp Documents work? Sending a document is a matter of tapping the attachment icon in any chat and choosing the new blue Document icon.
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Have you ever wanted to view a document on your smartwatch? Don't lie. What, you have? Oh, well, um, now you can, all thanks to developer appfour.
To lay your eyes on 1.3 inches of barely readable fuzziness, open the Documents app on your smartwatch. The app will pull the list of recently used documents from your phone. You can tap on any of them to get a fullscreen view (which ultimately doesn't amount to much) of the paper, slideshow, or spreadsheet.
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Last year when material design was introduced to the world, Google emphasized that its specs were a living document. Indeed we've seen several updates to the spec itself since it launched, but Google's also paying attention to its overall design presence, as evidenced by today's major update to google.com/design.
The site has been made over with a new grid filled to the brim with awesome content.
Google has added design guidance for TV and Auto, and even added an entire article about branding in material design, something I've written about before here at AP. There are also guides for designing between platforms and a downloadable icon font.
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Wouldn't it be nice if every international tech company was as accommodating to competing platforms as Microsoft? The company's Android support for the last year or so has been nothing short of amazing - it must make all twenty Windows Phone users really pissed off at Google for its lack of reciprocation. The latest Microsoft app to make the jump to Android is Delve, a collaboration tool for Office 365 users.
Delve is basically a stream of all the changes made to shared Word, PowerPoint, and Excel files to which you have access. That might not seem like much, but for a team that runs on Office 365 it can be extremely useful.
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