Category: App Update

After five years of virtually no updates or improvements, the all new Google Voice experience launched today.  The new 5.0 build of the app brings a Material Design look and feel to the Android app as well as an improved Web and iOS interface.  Functionally, there isn’t much new as far as what you get with Voice.  The apps however are a big improvement.

The new Google Voice apps has the more contemporary three-tab navigation with a FAB (Floating Action Button) for various activities in the app.  The app’s tabs are for messages, Calls and visual voicemail.  The new web interface has a similar design with the different tabs being accessible on the left side of the screen.  It is a vast improvement over the clunky KitKat-style previous build.

Microsoft has pushed an update out to the Android version of Excel, Word and PowerPoint to the Play Store.  The updated Office 365 apps brings new features to each app that continue the company’s drive to have feature parity between the desktop and the mobile screen.  For Excel, the big new feature is the ability to open a file that contains form controls.  Form controls, as the name suggests, are when you have a form embedded into a spreadsheet.  This previously could only be opened on the desktop.

For PowerPoint, a likely more useful addition than the form controls in Excel for most of us.  Now in PowerPoint on Android you can send a single slide to someone.  Previously you had to send the entire presentation and couldn’t send an individual slide.  Again, this is something you could do on the desktop and online version of PowerPoint but now can do it on your phone or tablet.

Users of Google Docs, Sheets and Slides on Android will find minor updates rolling out for each of the productivity apps.  For the most part, these updates are bug fixes and performance improvements but in the case of Google Docs and Google Slides, there are new features in each.  For Docs, you now have the ability to add page numbers to a document from the app.  You have been able to do this in Docs on the web for a long time but it has finally made its way to the Android app for the sake of feature parity.

For Google Slides, the ability to import and export OpenDocument formatted files (.odp) has been added to the presentation app.

Microsoft has pushed a new update out to Outlook for Android users.  The update should be hitting users in the next few days and when it does, you will find a new Mentions features.  The new feature allows you to mention people or call attention to things in your email by using the @ sign in your email.  When you use @ in your email, you will get a pop-up of your frequently used contacts or you can dive into your contacts list (personal or corporate if on Office 365).  This makes it just a couple of taps away from adding a person to an email you are sending.

Yahoo has rolled out an update to Flickr for Android that over all, isn’t that exciting.  It is mostly a bug fix release and a new notable feature of seeing photos from your groups within your feed on the home page.  The bigger news in this update however is there is no longer a requirement to sign up with a Yahoo account.

It goes without saying that Yahoo is an unholy mess.  The company, once one of the pillars of the online world, is a shadow of itself and Verizon looks to be picking the carcass for valuable bits.  If and when that happens, Yahoo will have a name change and will cease to exist.  But one that that will stick around it seems is Flickr.  The photo storage & sharing company was acquired by Yahoo back in 2005 and one of the early changes they made to the app was the requirement for a Yahoo account.  At the time, it angered a lot of pre-Yahoo users but 11 years later, the requirement has been abandoned.

Google Maps has a big update rolling out that brings a nicely integrated car sharing booking element to it.  The ability to see ride share services like Uber and Lyft has been in Maps for a while now but if you wanted to actually book an Uber, you had to go to the Uber app to do it.  No more.  Now you can link your Uber account to Google Maps and can book your ride right from within the app.  Further, you can see the location of your driver within the app and you don’t even have to have the Uber app installed on your phone for all this to work.

What you do need however is the latest build of Google Maps.  That is version 9.43.2 for those keeping score at home and it is currently rolling out to the Play Store.