Category: Google

Google has quietly released an update to the web version of Google Photos today with the main improvements having to do with editing and cropping.  The first change has to do with improving editing speed while switching between photos.  To this point, if you wanted to edit a photo, you would have to go into edit mode and the back out of that mode if you wanted to go to another photo and edit it.  That’s gone with this update.  Now you can stay in edit moved as you move between photos on Google Photos, increasing the speed at which you can edit photos while decreasing the number of clicks.

Google’s developer conference, Google I/O, will be coming up on May 18-20th in Mountain View, California and starting next week you can register for the event.  Earlier today the company rolled out the conference website where you will be able to register for the opportunity to attend.  That’s right, just because you register doesn’t mean that you will actually get into the event.  Tickets, as you can imagine, are extremely limited even at their $900 price tag.

The Google Maps app for Android has seen a minor update that brings a couple of small but important features to the app.  The update is version 9.21 for those keeping score at home and it is rolling out to the Google Play Store now.  You should see the OTA update hit your device over the course of the next couple of days.

The first change is a new notification for edits that you have made in Google Maps.  As you know, users of the app can edit all kinds of information about a business or location within the app.  You can change things like location (the pin drop location), the address, open hours, etc. to make sure that you and others users have the most up-to-date information.  These types of edits are verified by Google themselves and can take a day or two before they actually go live.  Now you can be informed of any edits you make going live within the app itself.

Google Drive for Android has been updated with a feature that many of us who spend more time on their mobiles versus their desktop have wanted:  Trash management.  With the latest version of the app, version 2.3.583.20.30 for those keeping score at home and like playing Google Version Bingo, you now have the ability to view items in your Trash, permanently delete those items or restore them to your Google Drive files.  It is a simple feature but a huge step forward if you accidentally delete a file.  Until this point that mean going to a PC, Mac or Chromebook and going to the Google Drive site.  No more!

The improvements to Google+ for Android continue to roll and the latest update once again addresses a lot of bug fixes and improvements.  News of the new 7.3 version came via Google’s Luke Wroblewski on his Google+ profile and outlines a significant number of changes that are happening in the social network & community app.  The update has been pushed to the Google Play Store but it may be a day or two before all users see it on their devices.

Spotify has announced that starting this year they will be moving their back end cloud platform to Google Cloud Platform globally.  The move comes as the streaming service has continued to grow rapidly and the data center requirements and hardware have become painful to manage.  The post from Vice President of Engineering and Infrastructure, Nicholas Harteau, was candid in their reasons for the move.

But in a business growing quickly in users, markets and features, keeping pace with scaling demands requires ever increasing amounts of focus and effort. Like good, lazy engineers, we occasionally asked ourselves: do we really need to do all this stuff?

For a long time the answer was “yes.” Operating our own data-centers may be a pain, but the core cloud services were not at a level of quality, performance and cost that would make cloud a significantly better option for Spotify in the long run. As they say: better the devil you know…

Recently that balance has shifted. The storage, compute and network services available from cloud providers are as high quality, high performance and low cost as what the traditional approach provides.