Wait, what’s that smirk on your face? Oh, I see. You’re happy another week is over and are looking forward to enjoying your weekend. Here’s hoping to have a good one – maybe don’t waste it playing Dark Souls 3 until 4am just to die for the hundredth time. However, just before your usual pre-Monday sickness kicks in, here’s a Recap of what happened the past week!
More Google stuff
Google is on fire with updates lately. Following the momentum gained last week, more apps and features got released.
Google Play Music finally has podcast support. And that would be great news if only podcasts wouldn’t be region locked, as for now they’re available only for the US and Canada. It’s quite annoying how Google sometimes tend to release products most of us in Europe cannot and will never be able to use in the near future.
To quote a random redditor, “Thank you Google for letting me know there is another great, interesting and useful service/product I can’t have, I really appreciate feeling like a second rate customer because I’m not from North America”.
Plus, it looks like a rushed job overall. No way to mark things as listened to, no playback speed option, no automatic playlist creation, many podcasts are missing and there is no RSS option, No video podcasts, no transcriptions, no way to donate to podcasts, or any of the other features you expect in a podcast app.
Quite disappointing to say the least. Be sure check out our article on ETT for a more in-depth read on this topic, and we also discussed this on last night podcast.
There’s another interesting update regarding podcasts: you can now listen to your favorite voices straight from the Google app!
It’s as easy as searching for a podcast and you’ll see three recent episodes, with an option to see more episodes. Unlike Play Music, this feature is available globally in English. Which makes us question why not doing this straight away with the Music app, instead of making multiple services with the same function.
Even more interesting is the fact that you’ll be free to browse the web on your phone while you listen, or even turn off your screen. The podcast will keep playing in the background until you’re done (and I’m looking at you, YouTube app!).
Google Camera updated!
Google camera was bumped to version 3.2.042, and you know, we all like updates and new things to play with. It seems they’re slowly pushing updates to uniform with the N material design, which is always a good thing. Please refer to the poor quality screenshot I made on the side to have an idea of the visual improvements found in the updated app.
In fact, here’s the ARM64 (Nexus 5x/6p) changelog:
- You can now take photos while shooting video once again (there’s a new button on the top right)
- Slow motion is now a separate pullout menu item rather than a button in regular video mode
- Updated shutter button
- Updated icon for front/rear camera swap
You can safely download the apk from apkmirror and install it, or just wait for the Play Store notification and the update will be ready for download.
3D touch on Android
Google Confirms that Android will receive 3D Touch support for pressure-sensitive displays! This was tested out with the new “launcher shortcuts” feature Google will implement on its launcher.
Well, it’s more of a swipe-down gesture shortcut, but has the same purpose anyway. Since explaining this with words is quite awkward, I suggesting having a look at 3D Touch working on Nova Launcher in the video below – courtesy of Phandroid.
Flashfire updated to v0.32: fastboot galore
Flashfire, a beautiful tool written by our based god Chainfire, got an update this Wednesday – April 20th, allowing you to create and flash backups straight from Fastboot. No need for custom recovery or anything else, which is pretty amazing.
According to Chainfire, this is a new and experimental feature, so bugs and stuff that break things at random should be expected.
Furthermore: “The backup itself is a ZIP file containing partition chunks (similar to Motorola’s sparsechunk format) and a flash-all.bat file to perform the restore. The commands in that batch file should also work on Linux and OSX, but regardless of platform, the fastboot command needs to be on the PATH, and support the -u switch (which all recent Android SDK versions do). Obviously, your bootloader also needs to be unlocked for the flash to work”
You can install the latest version by:
- Joining the Google beta
- APKmirror
