Author: Clinton

After being leaked a few weeks back, the new looking Gmail UI is now rolling out to everyone.  It will take a few weeks to get to everyone out there but when you do get it, there will be the option under Settings to try the new Gmail out and use it on the web and on the mobile apps.

The update brings a refresh to a product that has needed it for a long while.  Gmail’s UI fundamentally hasn’t changed in years and this update brings a more Material Design look to it as well as several advanced features like Smart Replies and the ability to snooze emails to handle them later.

In addition to the security update released for iOS 11.3.1 today, Apple also released a minor security update for MacOS 10.13.4.  The update to High Sierra brings two patches to two vulnerabilities on the platform in a 1GB update.  It is available to all Macs running High Sierra.

The first patch has to do with a memory corruption issue in the Crash Reporter that could allow for an application to gain elevated privileges.  This issue was found by the Google Project Zero team, Google’s security team that finds issues within Google’s products as well as Apple and Microsoft products.

Today Apple has released a small update to iOS for iPhone and iPad devices.  The update is iOS 11.3.1 and addresses a handful of security flaws found in the mobile platform.  The update is a relatively small at 105MB that should take less than 10 minutes to download and install based on your connectivity.

As for fixes, there are four outlined in the release notes having to do with elevated privileges or malicious code.  First, the Crash Reporter was patched against a memory corruption issue that could allow for elevated privileges to happen.  This error was found by Google Project Zero.

Google Backup & Sync, the desktop app that allows you to sync your Google Drive to your PC or Mac, has a nice update rolling out that brings a lot of fixes, particularly for MacOS users.  The updated version of Backup & Sync is build 3.41.9267.0638 for those keeping score at home and it is the same build for both MacOS and Windows.  The update was released last week so chances are you have been updated to this new build already.

The big news in this update is the fixing of a bug on HEIF and HEIC image files. High Efficiency Image Format, or HEIF, is pretty new and is something iOS 11.x devices use for the most part for image file formats.  When they first started hitting Google Photos and Google Drive, you could view them as you could with any other supported image format.  However a bug introduced at the beginning of the year made HEIF images not visible in Google Photos.  You could view them in Google Drive, but not Photos.  This update to Google Backup & Sync appears to have fixed the issues.

A new update to the Google Pay app is rolling out in the Google Play Store today.  While the update itself, version 1.57 for those keeping score at home, doesn’t bring a lot of excitement on the surface, there are some potentially exciting things in the code that could bring big improvements to the app.

A teardown of the app by the team over at Android Police points to code within the Google Pay app where airline boarding passes could be supported.  This would allow for the Pay app to be the center of your travel, not just a tap-to-pay app.  Given that the app already supports some transit tickets with more coming, supporting airline boarding passes isn’t a big stretch.

The SwiftKey team at Microsoft has rolled out another new update to the SwiftKey for Android app.  The update, version 7.0.3.19 for those keeping score at home, brings support for five new languages, Alsatian, Fongbe, Norman, Urdu (English), and Warlpiri, as well as several bug fixes to the keyboard alternative for Android phones.

With the addition of Alsatian, Fongbe, Norman, Urdu (English), and Warlpiri, SwiftKey for Android now supports well over 200 languages natively, making it one of the most language diverse apps in the Google Play Store.