Author: Clinton

Fitbit for iOS has a new update rolling out that finally brings one of the most requested features of female users of the fitness tracking app and devices.  With the new update, women can opt-in to a new Female Health Tracking which will allow women to track their monthly menstrual cycle to better understand their bodies and their cycles, something that is unique to every women.

Fitbit announced the new feature last month and it is rolling out to iOS users today while it should hit Android users later this month.  Once you have the app update and have identified yourself as a female in the app, you should get a pop-up to opt into the new feature.  It is only available for women 13 years and older.

Gmail for iOS has a new update rolling out in the App Store, bringing with it two key new features in tow.  The new build, version 5.0.180422 for those keeping score at home, brings the ability to snooze emails along with sending money to contacts via Google Pay.

The ability to snooze emails is a new feature to Gmail in general, having arrived in the new user experience for the mail service online as well as in the Android app.  It allows you to select a day and time when you want to respond to an email.

Today in Mountain View, California, the home of Google, the tech giant will be kicking off their annual developers conference.  Google I/O is one of the more important events and is the second developer conference going on this week behind Microsoft’s Build conference.

The event kicks off this morning at 10:00 am Pacific (1:00 pm Eastern) with the keynote address from Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai.  You can watch the streaming of his keynote on the Google I/O site, https://google.com/io for free.

The fourth beta of the upcoming update to MacOS High Sierra has been released to private as well as public beta testers.  The newest build of MacOS 10.13.5 doesn’t specifically call out any new updates or features and comes a week after the 3rd beta was released.  The update to the beta build coincides with the update of the beta for iOS 11.4, which released earlier today.

The timing of the fourth beta is a bit strange and suggests that perhaps Apple ran into a significant bug with the 3rd beta released last week.  That isn’t 100% certain of course as Apple is notoriously tight lipped about things like that, but the timing suggests it at least.

As expected today, Google has released the May 2018 Android Security Update for the Pixel and Nexus devices.  The update, which consists of two patches, is rolling out now to compatible Google devices.  With it being the Monday of the first full week of the new month, it was expected we would see these patches land today.

As has become the norm, there are two patches for this month’s Android Security Update.  The first, dated May 1, 2018, consists of 7 patches, all of which are marked as High priority.  The patches in this build deal with general Android items like frameworks, runtimes and other base elements to the platform.

After some 17 months of testing in various shapes and forms, Android Things has finally been released.  The 1.0 version of Android for IoT (Internet of Things) devices, brings all the benefits of Android but in a streamlined, power friendly package.  Developers of Android should find Android Things familiar straight away.

The beauty of Things is that you have access to all the APIs, development tools and resources that are already used in Android development and can use them to develop hardware solutions on certified Android Things hardware for use in IoT projects.