Sharing any type of content within a group can be quite a pain
sometimes and many times, issues go unresolved and content gets
inadvertently ignored due to the nature of the group dynamic. This is
ironic since one of the points of being in a group and using apps for groups is to be more effective. Any tool that can make this process easier is welcome. Spaces… | ShutterstockGoogle Spaces,
announced on May 16th, 2016 represents Google’s effort at improving the
small group dynamic. With Spaces, you can easily locate the content you
wish to share from directly within the app and share it with the people
in your Spaces.
But why should you try Spaces over other services that allow for group sharing? Let’s explore this.
Note: Spaces is available on Android, iOS as well as on the web.
You don’t need to worry about copy and pasting links to media that you want to share. The app has a built-in browser as well as YouTube built right in, which means that content can be shared from right within the app without too much effort.
Images from your gallery can be used to make posts and there is always the option of making a simple text post.
2. Interactive Nature
Ok, you can easily share content but what about feedback from persons
who your Space is shared with? Well, each post made in a space allows
for an interactive chat between persons in the Space.
The interface for commenting on posts is identical to a typical chat
interface. Also, a snapshot of the post is always visible at the top of a
discussion which helps to keep things focused.
3. Keep Track of Activity Easily
In a group setting, things can move fairly quickly at times and it
may be difficult to keep up with what’s going on. Luckily Spaces’ Activity tab highlights recent activity. This way, users don’t have to wonder what they missed.
This feature also aids in the locating of content.
4. Easily Find Posts With Search
As you continue to make posts, it will become increasingly difficult
to find older content. The search feature of Spaces allows for you to
carry out a search across all of your Spaces. You are not limited to just searching within one space at a time.
Conclusion
The features of Spaces combine to give the app a more casual feel.
This app is not particularly geared towards business users but would
probably be more suitable for a group of persons who share a hobby.
Posts can be created quickly and feedback can be clearly communicated. Spaces streamlines the group sharing dynamic quite well.
Although there has been some talk that Spaces is just a rehash of Google+ Communities,
this is not necessarily the case. Google+ doesn’t have the personal
appeal of a Space. A Community is better suited for providing
information to a more general audience while a Space is suited to a more
closely knit group of persons.
It will be interesting to see how this app is accepted across the
board and if it survives in the long run or is eventually banished to
the scrap heap despite its potential. We shall see.
Soundhound is a service that makes it easy to figure out what song is
playing. The company has recently ventured into the virtual assistant
realm. The new Hound app for Android and iPhone has some great features. The app won’t dethrone Siri or Google Now on most mobile devices.
What Does Hound Do?
Hound is supposed to answer voice queries for both simple and complex
information. During the walkthrough they give a few examples:
What’s the temperature?
How about tomorrow morning in Austin, Texas?
How about two months from now?
Each question builds on the last. Hound knows you meant the
temperature in the second query. In the third query, Hound knows you
meant Austin and temperature and gives the average temperature.
In another example, you can ask Hound “Find me coffee shops with
Wi-Fi nearby” then ask which ones are open and have Wi-Fi. No need to
repeat what you are looking for.
Hound also lets you book an Uber directly from the app and even
estimates fares. Fare estimates aren’t easy to find in the Uber app and
it doesn’t take voice commands.
Most of the other features in Hound are also in Siri and Now. Of
course, since SoundHound makes Hound, it recognizes music just fine. It
won’t take you to the iTunes or Google Play store to buy the song. I
asked it after it recognized the song “Bad Romance” to “Tell me the
lyrics.” Hound said the song doesn’t have lyrics. Bad dog.
Looking for lyrics? Check out our review of MusiXmatch.
What Hound Can’t Do?
Because Hound is an app, you can’t start it with one swipe or a click
of the home button. You’ll need to be in the app. That decreases the
app’s usefulness dramatically. If you switch apps, you lose your
assistant. One of the key selling features of Siri or Google Now is they
are accessible everywhere and across apps.
Hound also can’t interact with most other apps. You can’t change
settings or look up information from other apps. For example, it can’t
check your email. On the iPhone or Android phone, if you ask Hound to
call someone it will dial. If you try to text, though, it opens up the
messaging app but doesn’t send the text on the iPhone. The Android
version doesn’t have that limitation.
Where Hound Excels Compared to Siri and Google Now
When I asked Siri about the temperature, it got that right. Siri
didn’t understand when I asked about tomorrow morning in Austin Texas.
It thought I was looking for stores by that name.
Google Now understood the second question I asked, but didn’t
vocalize the results. Not bad. Google Now didn’t catch my question “two
months from now?” related to the weather. Neither Google nor Siri
understood a question about coffee shops nearby with free Wi-Fi.
Another area Hound does well is translations. When I ask Siri “How do
you say Hello in Hebrew?” it transfers me to Wolfram and spells out the
word Hello using Hebrew letters. Google Now does better. Hound,
however, got the word correct and pronounced it for me, but only on the
iPhone. Hound didn’t give me that option on Android. Best of all, Hound
got the pronunciation correct. When I followed up with “How do you say
very good hound,” Hound knew I meant a Hebrew translation and again got
it correct. Good dog indeed.
Need more translation? Check out our complete guide to Google Translate.
Best Use Case for Hound
I’ll stick with my built-in assistants for most functions. They’re
already there and can answer a quick question. When I’m looking for
deeper analysis or just a quick ride from Uber, I’ll go take Hound out
for a walk. Hopefully, Soundhound will teach this dog new tricks in the
future, so might as well keep it on your mobile device.
Google Keep and Google Docs at face value have very similar
intentions. The two services aim to collect what you need to document in
some way. Google Keep does this in a very informal way with a UI
similar to a sticky note board, while Google Docs is more a full-fledged word processor.
Turn your sticky notes from Keep into professional documents | Shutterstock
Sometimes, you might get started jotting something down in Google Keep
and find that it’s probably better suited in the format of a longer
document. Perhaps for organizational or backup purposes you just want to
keep extra copies of your Google Keep stuff in Docs. Either way, check
out this quick trick for transferring notes from Google Keep over to
Google Docs whether you’re on web or mobile.
Note: While this feature will
successfully transfer over your content, some of the formatting
exclusive to Google Keep won’t make the cut in the transfer. For
instance, if you changed the background color of your note, the
resulting Google Doc will still have a plain white background.
Transferring Notes on the Web
To transfer your notes from Google Keep to Google Docs on the web, first visit the Google Keep website. Either create a new note by clicking Add note or hover over an existing note you have underneath.
Menu options will appear when you hover over a note. Click the three vertical dots and here you’ll find Copy to Google Doc. Click this.
The note will copy quickly and then at the bottom of the screen you
should see a message stating a successful copy was made. To open it in
Google Docs, click Open.
Sure enough, you should see that the note is now in your Google Docs library with arguably a higher degree of professionalism and customization tools as well.
Transferring Notes on Mobile
To transfer a note from Google Keep to Google Docs on your smartphone, download the Google Keep app for iOS (which finally exists) or Android. The Google Docs app isn’t necessary. Log in with your Google account to bring up your notes.
Select the note you want to copy to Google Docs and on the top right,
tap the vertical three dots. The menu option may not come up right
away, but if you scroll all the way to the bottom you’ll see Copy to Google Docs.
Tap that and wait a few seconds. Then click Open to see the document.
Note: If you have the Google Docs app it’ll open in that,
otherwise it will just open in a browser window. The web page will ask
you if you want to download the Docs app for the future, which is
necessary for making any edits. This is something to consider.
At the recently held annual Google I/O conference, Sundar Pichai announced that out of every 10 phones shipped worldwide, 8 were running on Android. What’s more, there are more than 1 billion active users on the Google Play Store. Surprisingly though, not all great apps that you can run on your Android device are available directly on the Play Store itself. There are some that are available elsewhere and Google will not publish these due to their nature or non-compliance of certain Google policies.
To make matters simpler, we’ve divided the article in 2 separate sections. The first for non-rooted phones and the second for rooted devices.
To Root or Not to Root? We explore the pros and cons of rooting and talk about whether it’s right for you. Do check it out.
Unrooted Devices
1. Popcorn Time
Love watching TV Shows & Movies? Well, who doesn’t. Popcorn Time lets you do just that with the convenience of a simple yet elegant app. Once installed, it gives you easy access to the most popular Movies and TV shows by a simple swipe from the right. There is also a third category for Anime as well, if you’re into those.
There’s a built-in VPN option for those who want to use the app securely. There are plenty of options to customize the look and feel of the app, from the color and size of the font, to the total number of connections and maximum download speed. The whole service runs on torrents, so ensure you have good bandwidth while choosing which movie to stream. Get Popcorn Time here.
Note: Needless to say, the movies you watch using the above app may or may not be legal. At Guiding Tech we neither condemn nor condone piracy. So do check the laws of your land before you decide to use any torrent-based app, including the one we mention above.
2. MiXplorer
A free non ad-supported file browser with great functionality built right into it – that’s the easiest way to describe MiXplorer. The app looks like it’s running Material Design, but is compatible with Android devices running OS v2.0+ (if they’re still around).
Not only does it have a theme engine to customize the looks of the app, but it also has cloud integration with more than a dozen services. Although you may require root access to enjoy some of the more advanced features of this app, even so, this is a great app, well worth exploring. Get MiXplorer here.
3. QuickLyric
Ever wanted an app that gives you the lyrics of all the songs in your library? Well, this is the perfect app for you, and even though there are some alternatives available on the Play Store, they don’t all scan your music library and download the lyrics for offline use.
It also appears that the devs of this app have tried their best to stick to Material Design, although it’s not a uniform experience throughout. But who’s complaining for an app that’s free and works like a charm every time. Get QuickLyric here.
Rooted Devices
1. Adaway
Tired of all the ads that keep popping up in those ad-supported apps? Well, there is an easy fix to this problem. Simply install Adaway! Naturally, Google has never been fond of such apps and you will never find these in the Play Store. But how hard is sideloading an Android app anyway? Once installed, it simply checks for updated files and merges them with the current list.
Once installed, there’s nothing else that needs to be done. The app does all the hard work automagically, while you can enjoy all your (ad-supported) apps without interruptions and annoying pop-ups.
Want to install those tablet-only apps on your smartphone? Or vice-versa? Well, Market Helper is just the app that you’re looking for. Once you install the app, just go about selecting what device you want emulated, even if you wish to select a different carrier. Once selected, hitActivate, and voila! You’ve got a notice that your device is registered as the one you wanted.
Not all carriers in countries with an asterisk are supported, but hey – something is better than nothing, right?! Also, if you feel that your phone has been transforming a bit too much and you can’t even recognize it anymore, all you have to do is a simple reboot. It goes back to whatever it was before it started shape-shifting. Err, you know what I mean!
Want to remove ads? Check. Want to modify permissions given to apps? Check. Want to bypass premium license verification and still do more? Check, check, and check! This is the ultimate all-in-one amazing app that you’ve been waiting for.
Lucky Patcher also gives you unlimited access to reading apps like NYT and The Wall Street Journal, but since everything is done via a ‘patch’, it will find no place in the Play Store. Get Lucky Patcher here.
Wanna Play Outside the Play Store?
Even though the Play Store is filled with millions of apps (and hundreds are added every day) there are still a few around the world wide web that are not published there, for one reason or another. Have you tried any of these? What has your experience been? Do let us know in the comments section below.
But there’s some good news. Google is at least trying to be transparent about this issue. Instead of burying settings that let you opt out of some of the crazier trackers, they’re now putting a lot of it front and center (not everything of course, this is Google, after all).
At first glance, the Privacy Check-up tool might look simple. It’s just a step by step process with toggles to turn features on or off, right? Wrong. There are popups, help pages to read, confirmation pages to dodge and Google’s clever PR writing to read through.
So for the greater good, we’ve created this walkthrough (yes, like those game walkthroughs you look up every time you’re stuck in a mission in GTA) to help you out. Let’s get started.
1. Choose the Google+ Profile Information You Share with Others
Show these profile tabs to visitors: First, we’ll go through what the world, your friends or not, see when they land on your Google+ page (if, ever).
Google+ has special tabs for profile pages and here you can disable Photos, YouTube/Videos,+1 and Reviews. When all of them are turned off, no stranger on the internet can access all your photos, videos, +1s or your Play Store reviews.
Talking about Google+, the social network lets you hide everything other than your name, profile photo and cover photo from strangers.
Google+ Communities: If you don’t want the world to know about the weird Google+ Communities you’re involved in, uncheck this option.
Photos and videos: The first option stops Google from using your publicly shared photos in any of Google’s services. Right now, includes backgrounds for Chromecast and Google Fiber but tomorrow that might change.
In the second option, you can toggle Google’s Find my Face feature. This feature lets you and other people tag your face in photos and when that happens, Google creates a face map for you. This is then used to intelligently identify all the photos you’re in.
Shared endorsements: This is an important one and where your name and face can end up in a place you might not want – ads. And Google knows this, because disabling Shared endorsements is a 4-step process.
First, click the Edit your shared endorsements button. A popup will show up describing what the process means and you’ll see examples of how your publicly shared reviews and +1s can end up in ads. Scroll down, and click on the checkbox. This will prompt another window to make sure you know what you’re doing. Click Continue and finally, Done.
2. Help People Connect with You
Here, you’ll see the primary phone number connected to your Google account. This setting means that when someone already has your phone number, they can easily look you up on Hangouts or Google+. If you don’t share your phone number with anyone, this setting shouldn’t affect you. A side effect of leaving this feature on would mean that if someone does stumble upon your phone number, they can easily link it to you.
3. Manage What You Share on YouTube
From here you can disable how much of your YouTube viewing activity is shared with your friends and the world. You can choose to keep all your liked videos, saved playlists and subscriptions private from your friends and followers.
Talking about your YouTube channel, you can choose to post to a feed when you add a new video to a public playlist, when you like a video or when you subscribe to a channel.
4. Personalize Your Google Experience
Ok guys, this is the biggie. The options you choose here will determine exactly what information Google gets, stores, uses, and shares (with either third parties or with the web).
Web & App Activity:If you’re a heavy Google user, you probably shouldn’t disable this option. This option lets Google keep a history of all your searches as well as everything you browse on all devices with Chrome. Yeah, that’s a lot of information, but it’s the same information that brings up better search results in Chrome, updates from websites and topics in Google Now and more.
Location History:Feel free to disable and delete this one because it’s not going to majorly affect how you use Maps to navigate. Features like traffic updates and navigation will work fine. The only thing that will be different is that Google won’t store all the location data it tracks from your Android phone (which is usually constantly).
Device Information: Device Information settings keep a record of all the devices that you use Google services with. If you click the Manage Activity button, you’ll be taken to a page that will show a daily history of all your connected devices.
Voice & Audio Activity: When you use Google Now’s voice search or the OK Googlefunctionality, your voice is recorded and used to improve the service. You can turn this recording option off but then you won’t have access to the always-on OK Google feature.
YouTube Search History: This is simple enough, you can stop Google from keeping a history of your YouTube searches.
YouTube Watch History: YouTube has a Watch History feature where you get a list of every video you’ve ever seen. This option lets you turn it off.
5. Make Ads More Relevant to You
This setting is nothing more than a shortcut to a detailed ad settings page that has always existed. But never mind, you’ve made it this far, let’s see this through.
After you click Manage your ads settings, you’ll be taken to a page that looks neither simple nor uses Material Design. You’ll see two columns for Ads on Google and Google ads across the web. Here you’ll find data about you that is used to target ads specifically based on your interest and demographic.
If you wish Google wouldn’t do that and instead just showed you generic ads, you can click theOpt-out link in either column. To be clear, this will not disable Google ads. You’ll still see them but now they won’t use your personal data. Also, you can delete data like your age, gender and interests that Google has for this specific use case.
How Did You Do?
What did you disable? Did you give up halfway through? Share with us in the comments below.
Google’s standalone, platform-agnostic, cloud backed photo management system is finally here. And boy it’s a doozy. Let’s find out more about what exactly it is and if should you jump on it.
TL;DR: The Pitch
Google Photos is born out of Google+ Photos and is a standalone service with apps for Android, iOS and a website.
You can upload unlimited photos to the service for free (more on the specifics below). Photos, once uploaded to the cloud, will show up on all your devices.
The app will automatically tag photos depending on location, facial recognition and time. They’ll be intelligently pooled together. Manual organization options are available and there’s a powerful search feature as well.
1. Unlimited Free Backup
Yup. Free, unlimited backup for all your images and videos. The photos that are automatically backed from your camera roll, the specific folders you assign in the Android app, the ones you manually upload from the web, all of them.
Yes, there’s a fine print. All the images till 16 MP will be stored in original quality and for videos, that’s 1080p. Anything higher than that will be downscaled.
What this means is that all the photos from my iPhone or OnePlus One will be stored in Google Photos, without any compression, for free. But images from my DSLR will be downscaled. Of course, you can choose to have your images stored in full-res, but that storage will be counted against your Google account. Here you get 15 GB for free and 1 TB plan is $10 a month.
But you know what, I’m going to back up all my DSLR images to Google Photos anyway (manually, via the website). I don’t mind downscaling from 24 MP to 16. I love me some free, reliable cloud storage.
About image compression: Even if you upload photos of 16 MP or lower, Google is still going to compress them. But, as one user on Reddit found out, while the difference between the size of the compressed image is significant, the drop in quality isn’t nearly as drastic. Much like the machine learning based scanning, Google’s compression algorithms are quite sophisticated. They seem to be only removing data that doesn’t affect the quality of the image to an average user’s eye. See the comparison between Google Photos and other compression services yourself here.
2. It’s No Longer Connected to Google+
This has to be one of the best things about Google Photos, other than the free unlimited thing of course. A lot of what the Photos app does was already possible with Google+ Photos. But the problem was that you needed the Google+ app, and you had to go to the Google+ website to access all your photos, use their library for viewing images and while all photos were private by default, I personally still had problems with trusting the system.
Now though, Google has rinsed the + moniker off this baby and it’s ready to rule the world.
3. iOS Users, Pay Attention
I’m guessing Apple’s answer to Google Photos isn’t to0 far but right now, there is no free unlimited backup for iOS users. And backing up thousands of photos to your iCloud account costs money.
The good news for iOS users is that there’s a Google Photos app and it’s pretty good. Again, it’s a standalone app with no Google+ intrusions. The only problem is that unlike the Android app, it doesn’t have true background sync. But that’s iOS’s limitation. So if you decide to upload all of your thousands of photos to Google Photos, you’ll need to plug in your iPhone, turn off the auto sleep feature and let it do its thing for couple of hours.
But once that’s done, you should be fine. Users at this Reddit thread are reporting that the app is fast and stable and one user has replaced the Apple’s Photos app with Google Photos. He/she says “I’m not going to lie, I replaced the stock Photos app for this on my iPhone 6. It’s leaps and bounds ahead of the offerings of the stock Photos app in my opinion.”
4. Automatic Tagging and Organization Is Wonderful
Google has something else Apple doesn’t – all your personal information, amazing cloud prowess and years and years of studying un-humanly quantifiable data on the internet. You name it, Google has scanned it for all sorts of information. Yes, that’s creepy but if you’ve ever used Google Now, you know it’s also useful.
When you upload your entire photo library to Google Photos, Google will go through it and start automatically tagging stuff. It already knows what you look like, and when it won’t know the specifics of other faces in the photos, it will still know it’s that one person in all those photos. So even though your 5 year old niece has never seen the internet, Google will still have a tag with just her photos.
This also works based on location and time. Google will create automatic collections for trips you take or photos you took at home or work or a party. Google will also go one step forward and automatically create a highlights video from the footage, along with background music, so you don’t have to. All of this, of course, is editable by you, the user. The Photos app also comes with basic photo editing features along with an auto-enhance feature.
The little tips and tricks: The Photos apps are littered with small things like a fast way to select multiple photos (hold and swipe), quickly switching between days, weeks, monthsMoments view (two finger pinch in and out) and more. We’ll talk about those in detail in a future article.
5. Backed By Google Search
Once Photos has scanned all your photos you can search for them for location, time and even things. Because Google knows the difference between a dog and a cat, you can search for dogand all your dog photos will show up. Same for photos you took in New York.
6. The Price of Free Is Peace
There’s a quote that tech journalists like to tweet from time to time “When the price is free, you are the product”. And that’s true with all things Google. It just shines really brightly with Photos. Now if you’re a nervous-nelly when it comes to privacy, you probably should stay away from Google.
After all, a computer somewhere is scanning all your photos, analyzing it for details like location and faces. Yes, the service is largely free and yes, you’re paying by letting Google use your personal data. But if you’re fine with it (it is, after all, a computer), the upsides are tremendous.
Let me just say this – Photo management is hard.
So hard in fact that I’ve tried to take care of it several times and then given up. When you have thousands of photos and when you’re not willing to part with most of them, you start to run out of options.
Google Photos for you, is the easy way out. Just upload all the photos and let some computers take care of the mess.
And when you want to take matters in your own hand, there are features that will let you quickly select multiple photos and create albums on the fly. Sharing images is also easy. You get a web link that contains all the photos in one place – this can be accessible by anyone you share the link with, regardless if they have a Google account or not.
The service is free and frankly, if you already have an Android phone and use Gmail, you should be fine with the intelligent scanning features.
Because it’s free, anyone can use it, and everyone should. Dropbox will ask you to pay after 2 GB, iCloud after 5 but the Photos app never will.
Because it’s made by Google and is using technologies and server based automation that the likes of Apple and Dropbox just can’t do, it’s actually better than the paid options. If you’ve got a photo overload, just test it out and thank me later.
Sometimes, you might get started jotting something down in Google Keep
and find that it’s probably better suited in the format of a longer
document. Perhaps for organizational or backup purposes you just want to
keep extra copies of your Google Keep stuff in Docs. Either way, check
out this quick trick for transferring notes from Google Keep over to
Google Docs whether you’re on web or mobile.
