Author: Clinton

Google Maps for Android has had the ability to give you reminders of when you need to leave for your next appointment.  It is a handy feature and it takes into consideration things like traffic conditions to make sure you leave in enough time to make that appointment.  Now that same feature has rolled out to the web version of Google Maps.

With a change of the notification settings when you visit https://www.google.com/maps/ , you will now get a browser notification for when it is time to leave.  The notification works by drawing location information for your appointments from Google Calendar.

A new update to the Uber app for Android and iOS, along with a cloud-side update, has brought a new spotlight feature to the app.  Designed to help your driver locate you in a dark area or a crowded area, the update gives you the ability to hold up your phone and have your screen be a solid color that uniquely identifies you to your driver.

In addition, the car sharing service is now guaranteeing pickup times if you schedule a ride.  For example, if you schedule a ride for the afternoon to take you to the airport, you are given a guarantee time of when your driver will arrive.  If they don’t arrive by that time, you are credited $10 towards your next ride.

Google has quietly rolled out an update to the Google Phone app for Android, the dialer app for the Nexus and Pixel lineup and a few other phones out there that can run it.  The update brings the ability to send recognized spam calls straight to your voicemail and won’t even notify you of the call.  That way you don’t even face the distraction of a notification.

The feature only works on on calls that are recognized as spam calls from Google so it may be a bit hit-and-miss at times.  But when it does hit, it will be a great way be distraction free from these types of calls.

Microsoft is one of the best developers when it comes to frequent and meaningful updates to their swath of Android apps in the Play Store.  The Redmond, Washington company has released several updates to some of their apps as part of the normal monthly Office 365 updates.  All of these updates are now in the Play Store so you should be able to check for the update now or, if you have auto updates enabled, you likely have already been updated.

Outlook for Android has a great new feature that frankly I wish Gmail had:  Do Not Disturb.  It’s no mystery on what it does.  It prevents email notifications from showing up on your phone.  It works just like the DND feature in Android itself, meaning you can set it up for a specific amount of time or until you manually turn it back off.  Also, in Outlook, you can now delete contacts directly in the app.

After doing a limited A/B testing of the new look, YouTube has begun a full scale roll out of a new full screen width thumbnails look to the stream site.  Instead of having smaller thumbnails with the titles of the just below them, you have have a widescreen looking thumbnail with the title under it in a cleaner font.

The update appears to be a cloud-side update so as long as you are running the latest version of the app, you should see this new look roll out to you over the course of the next few hours.

The Chrome OS Dev Channel, essentially the alpha build channel for the platform, has received its third Chrome 69 based build today.  Build 69.0.3486.0 (Platform version: 10866.1.0) is the new build for testers in the channel and should be available to most devices already.  You can always check for the update by typing chrome://help in the browser bar.

As you would expect with an early build of any platform, this update to the Dev Channel has a slew of fixes to issues that were in the previous builds.  An issue with external monitor support has been fixed and Linux app stability & support, known as Project Crostini, has been improved in this update too.