Author: Clinton

Regardless of which Operating System you use, the majority of power users are always looking for ways to gain efficiency to their day-to-day activities.  Chrome OS users are no different.  As one who uses a Google Pixelbook for my daily driver, any time I can find a shortcut that makes things faster for me, I leverage it as much as I can.

The challenge with Chrome OS is not that these shortcuts are not there.  It is that the platform is still relatively new in the grand scheme of things and they are simply not well known.  Consider that Chrome OS is just shy of being 7 years old while Windows in some shape or form has been around for 33 years.  Even MacOS has been around for 17 years now.  The benefit of having that much time in development is all the little tricks to get to things or improve efficiency are documented.  Chrome OS?  Not so much.

That’s the point of this article.  I’m going to outline three trackpad tricks you have in Chrome OS that will hopefully make you a little bit more efficient.  All three of these tips are accessed by using three fingers on the trackpad and performing an action.

After slow rolling out to a few accounts over the past week, the Material Design makeover of Google Maps is now broadly rolling out.  The updated look and feel of the app brings a fresh new look to one of the most widely used apps from Google and also brings it in line with the Material Design makeovers the company has been doing on their apps in general.

The update is a combination of an app update and a cloud side update.  First, make sure you have the latest Google Maps version on your phone.  That is version 9.80.2 and it was released a few days ago.  Chances are you likely have it but double-check.  Assuming you have that version, then it is just a matter of when Google does the cloud-side push to your account to enable the new look.

Google has added a new Love Story auto movie creation feature in the latest update to Google Photos.  Like the other auto created movies, the Love Story feature is driven by Google Assistant which is deeply integrated into Photos.  The update to bring this new feature is a combination of an app update, to version 3.23.0.200631752 for those keeping score at home, and a cloud-side update that is pushed to this updated app version.

To get to the new Love Story feature, open up Google Photos then use the overflow menu (three vertical dots) to create a new movie.  There you will see all of the different auto generated movie options along with the new Love Story.

A new update to the Google Camera app is making its way out in the wild today, bringing integration with Google Lens to Google Nexus and Pixel phones.  The updated version is 5.2.025 for those keeping score at home.

At Google I/O, the Mountain View company indicated that devices that were compatible with the Google camera app would be getting Google Lens integration in the app.  To date, that has rolled out for several manufactures like Sony, Motorola and OnePlus but not on Google’s own devices.

Last week the new Westworld game landed for both Android and iOS.  I, like everyone who posted an announcement about the game, noted how similar it looked and played to Bethesda Softworks’ Fallout Shelter.  Well, it seems that Bethesda thinks so too and has filed a lawsuit against Warner Bros and Behaviour Interactive who held develop the game.

In a lawsuit filed on Friday, Bethesda claims that the game blatantly copies Fallout Shelter, down to the bugs in the game.  The key in all of this is Behaviour Interactive who was under contract with Bethesda back in 2014 to help produce Fallout Shelter, which was released in 2015.  The lawsuit claims that they used code and other information to create the Westworld game.

The second Chrome 68 based build has been made available for the Chrome OS Beta Channel.  Build 68.0.3440.34 (Platform version: 10718.29.0) is now available to most devices in the channel, the last stop before a build of Chrome OS is made available to everyone in the Stable Channel.

If you have a device that is running in the beta channel, you can type chrome://help in the browser bar and manually check for the update.  Given it was released on Friday, chances are you can get it on your device this morning pretty quickly.