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Android 12 screenshot markup tool now features fancy fonts
Still no sign of scrolling screenshots, tho
As a writer for a blog all about Android, I take a lot of screenshots. For example: this article. Android's featured a built-in editor for screenshots for a while now, but it's getting a little more useful in Developer Preview 3 of the upcoming Android 12. If you try out the new release, you'll see a font selection option for the markup tool.
On the heels of AT&T and other carriers promising (again) to stop proving location data to data aggregation companies, many customers of AT&T its MNVO Cricket have received an interesting text message. They were informed that they had consented to sharing "phone location or other subscriber, account, and device data" with third parties, without actually having consented.
A sad bit news hit Project Fi users' emails today. Google's MVNO service is shutting down text forwarding on September 12. While I'm sure not everyone on the carrier uses this feature, I personally have relied on it since joining Fi.
Google's AR Stickers began rolling out in December of 2017 to Pixel devices. At the time, users had 5 sticker packs to choose from when adding imaginary things on top of their real camera shots: Star Wars, Stranger Things, food, blocks, and text. Blocks were separated from the main app in February (Winter Sports were added then) and now food and text are seeing the same fate. The latest v1.2 update to the AR Stickers app shaves off about 28.5MB from the file by removing the two packs, which can now be downloaded separately.
Sometimes it seems like YouTube is perpetually testing different interfaces for its Android app. Based on reports we've received recently, yet another set of modifications is being tested. The latest round of tweaks is on the subtle side: some are seeing the thumbnails for individual videos in the Home tab show view counts, with more space for video titles and the channel logo repositioned below.
Google announced last month that one of the plans for Wear 2.0 had been to make the platform easier to update with software upgrades from the Play Store rather than relying so much on sending out a barrage of firmware updates. In the v2.6 update, quite a few improvements and little tweaks have been made to the interface, including new connection indicators, download status notifications, a recent app complication, and more.
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Google can't go a few days without some sort of critical issue hampering the use of their products. Most recently, there was the issue with Artem's Home Mini recording everything he said, but there have also been multiple bugs with Android Auto, Google Clock, and more. The latest problem? Some Pixel phones can't receive texts. This looks to have been an issue for a while, though it's taken until now for Google to respond. And until the company releases an actual fix, there's nothing Pixel owners can really do about it.
Google has been smoothing Android's rougher edges over the last few revisions, but there's one thing you interact with constantly that still needs some work: text. Until now, developers had to specify a text size, and that's all the text would be without third-party workarounds—even if that meant it was super-tiny or so big it overflowed. Now, they can create "autosizing TextViews" with Google's tools.
Between this job and school, I write a lot, so any tool that makes that task easier is great in my book. On that note, the G Suite team has rolled out a small, but great, change to Docs: you can now change the capitalization of a specific portion of text, and you get to choose between lowercase, all caps, and title case.
Snapseed started as a simple image editor, but it's been learning some impressive new tricks recently. It can even edit your RAW files these days. In the new v2.8 update, you can add text to your images with a ton of fonts and styles, and there is an auto-resize option for exports. The update is still rolling out, but we've got the APK ready for download if you don't want to wait.
Compared to the early days of Android and iOS, it's amazing how good virtual keyboards have become... but that doesn't mean there's no room for improvement. Long email and street addresses in particular are a pain to type in, especially outside of the browser where saved user information isn't available. If you're tired of typing out your thirty-character company email address, Texpand can help: it allows you to create customized shortcodes for longer strings of text and use them in any text field.
Copying and pasting is better than it used to be on Android, but it still isn't ideal - just like Windows, you can only keep one bit of text at a time saved in the "copy" cache. Also just like Windows, several apps have sprung up to improve this functionality, most notably Clipper. Native Clipboard handles most of the same functions - primarily keeping a saved history of all copied text - but adds some impressive UI tweaks to make using it even easier.
A single SMS message is generally limited to 160 characters, which gives it the potential to be a very concise means of communication. If, however, you feel that the point of your message will be hard to convey in such small snippets, Hangouts has a feature for you.
Sometimes the secret to success is to pick one thing and do it well. You could easily make the presumption that "image editing" may count as a thing, but in this case, think even more specific. Over is an app that specializes in letting users place text or basic artwork on top of their photos.
FreedomPop Adds The Galaxy Tab 3 7.0 LTE With Free Voice And Text Service To Its Hardware Lineup [Update]
FreedomPop Adds The Galaxy Tab 3 7.0 LTE With Free Voice And Text Service To Its Hardware Lineup
Update:
Update: Well that didn't take long. Here's what T-Mobile had to say in response.
For the relentless proof-readers among us, we've got a quick tip pointed out today by Reddit user SuperNanoCat. When writing in an editable text box on Android, users can highlight a word or chunk of text, then press and hold to drag it around.
Human capacity for speech seems infinite, but after writing a steady stream of text messages, emails, and posts over the years, things start to get repetitive. PhraseExpress has spared Windows users sentences, paragraphs, and pages worth of mundane conversation since its release, and now the software is ready to do the same for Android.
It's profoundly annoying when some janky web form or app crashes and you lose a bunch of text, but you're just a few clicks away from stopping that once and for all on your Android device. Type Machine silently backs up every word you type so you can retrieve it later. Does this sound both awesome and worrisome? Well, it's only one of those.