Author: Clinton

Twitter has begun the process of rolling out a new bottom navigation bar to everyone.  The update to the Twitter for Android app is a cloud-side update meaning that so long as you have the latest version of the app, you should get the new navigation bar in the social app.  For those that are curious, the latest version is 7.53.0.

There isn’t a lot of mystery here – you get a bottom navigation bar when this update is pushed to your account.  You have the Home (feed), search, notifications, and direct messages all a single tap away with the tab you are on highlighted in blue.

Arguably one of Microsoft’s most popular Android apps, and one of the most frequently updates, is Microsoft Launcher.  The launcher has now passed 10 million downloads and is great for readers who are deep in the Microsoft ecosystem at home or at work.  The app now had a new update rolling out that brings a handful of improvements, especially around the user interface.

For those keeping score at home, the new update is version 4.11.0.44176 and it has been released to the Play Store.  If you are using the launcher on your Android phone or tablet, you likely have the update available to you.

So what are you getting in this update?  First, on the Family card on the information screen (a right swipe on the home screen) you can now show or hid kids on that card for privacy reasons.   This assumes, of course, that you have children accounts associated with your own so that the feature will work.

Google Clips, the autonomous AI-driven camera from the Mountain View company, has a new update rolling out for the Android app that supports it.  It brings a new timelapse feature to the camera as well as other improvements to things like recognizing facial expressions.  The new build is version 1.6.2026903322 for those keeping score at home.

The big new feature in the app is timelapse support.  Now you can setup your Google Clips camera in this mode and it will capture a continuous stream of everything that the camera sees.  It will then condense it into a fast-forwarded timelapse which you can then save to your Google Photos account.  While it goes somewhat against the grain of what Google intended Clips to be – a spontaneous event capturing camera with your family, kids and pets – this new timelapse feature should give you a quick and easy way to capture things like sunrises and sunsets.

Google Home, and by extension Google Assistant, has quietly added iCal support for subscribed calendars in your Google Calendar.  To this point, Google Home could only read your primary calendar as well as holiday and birthday calendars.  But subscribed calendars couldn’t be read.  That now has changed.

If you have subscribed to an iCal calendar, you now have the option to add it to your list of calendars that can be read by Google Home and you can be updated when you ask about an event.

Based on a new Chrome OS commit in the Chromium Gerrit, and further support from Chrome OS evangelist François Beaufort, Android App Shortcut support is coming to the platform and likely soon.  The commit points to right-click support for Android apps in the platform to allow for users to access the app shortcuts for apps that support the feature.

For those who may not know, Android app shortcuts allow you to get to a quick action within an app simply by long tapping it on your Android phone or tablet.  The feature became available in Android Nougat 7.1 but really didn’t start to gain traction until Oreo was released last year.

The weeks leading up to a new release of Android are always fun, especially when it comes to the guessing game of what the new version will be named.  Google famously names each version after a tasty sweet treat, like Android Oreo for example.  The question to this point has been what will Android P be named?  Well, it seems Android Pistachio could be in the mix.

The Polish site TableTwo from one of their readers who reached out to Huawei support regarding the recently announced Oreo update for their phones.  In the exchange, which you can see the screenshots of at the link above, the tech drops the name Android Pistachio as the name of the next version.