Hasta La Gadget!

A ton of new features have arrived on the Google+ app for Android. To celebrate “Season for Shipping“, Google decided to roll out several new and useful features for their social network service, especially for Android users. Google says a total of 24 new “treats” have come to Google+ in this update, which should be beneficial for a lot of users this holiday season.

One of the big new features has to do with images. If you use Google’s instant upload feature on Android, Google is now letting you store up to 5GB of full-size photos for free. This 5GB of storage adds on to the already unlimited uploads for 2048-pixel photos. GIF images are also now supported in the mobile news feed, which is great news because people love posting GIFs.

Hangouts has also seen some improvements, and the service should now offer a smoother experience even on low bandwidth connections. So now, you’ll need only 150KB to connect to Hangouts on this new setting. The company has also streamlined the UI a bit and has hidden some of the annoying features that would show up, even when they weren’t being used.

The iOS version of Google+ also received an update, but not as big of an update as Android. Still, the new iOS version lets you swipe through photo albums inline, as well as tap on a photo to view it full-screen. Plus, the iPhone app now applies a pan-zoom-scale effect to pictures in the stream, which is subtle, but drastically improves the UI overall.

Lastly, Google+ Events received some improvements. You can now send messages to specific guests and see who’s opened up your invitation. You can also invite people through Google+ or by simply copying the event URL into an email or IM chat. Also, invites now have a slot for the number of guests an attendee is bringing, making it easier to keep track of the number of people coming to your party.

[via Android Community]

Google+ for Android updates with full-size image uploads, improved Hangouts, and more is written by Craig Lloyd & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

Google has revealed its answer to Facebook Groups, Google+ Communities, a way for like-minded souls to create hubs of discussion and media on any topic they’re interested in. Hitting all Google+ accounts today, Communities works as a topic-specific discussion board, with support for various sub-topics branching off from that, and with a choice of privacy settings to control whether anybody can participate, or if it’s locked down.

Communities can be made fully public, or demand membership before they can be used. Alternatively, they can be private, with a choice as to whether or not they show up in search results. It’s also possible to post new content to the Communities you’re part of simply by choosing them in the circles section of a new update.

Hangout video chats and Events are both integrated, as you’d expect, and there’s gallery support along with YouTube video embeds. There are also various filters, for cutting information down into specific topics, while members of individual Communities will be able to share directly into them by choosing that Community page when they hit +1 around the web.

“Facebook most generally is about the people you already know, about your real world connections” Google’s Brad Horowitz said of Google+ Communities’ rivals. “On Twitter, well it’s really hard to have a meaningful conversation in 140-character snippets.” According to Horowitz, the new feature is all about “making it easy to find your tribe.”

Google+ Communities:

[via TechCrunch; via TNW; via The Verge]

Google+ Communities turns social upstart into discussion hub is written by Chris Davies & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

While Google+ may not have the popularity of Facebook or Twitter, it seems Google is giving luddites more reasons to start using it by the day. They introduced direct embedding with Google Drive, and today they rolled out embedding of Android app links to the Google Play store, which offers one-click downloads right from Google+.

Whenever you post a link on your Google+ page to an Android app from the Google Play store, your friends who don’t have said app installed will be shown an option to install the app right from Google+ with one click. It’s a small and subtle update, but it will no doubt streamline the app recommendation process amongst friends and family.

Of course, we shouldn’t be too surprised by this, since Google is working on streamlining all of their services and integrating them with one another. This is just another step in that process, and sooner or later, we should be seeing full seamless support between all of the major Google services.

Head to our Google+ page to see the new feature in action, and while you’re at it, download our official Android app right from Google+ if you haven’t already. Plus, be sure to add us to your circles while you’re there — it’s said that we post some pretty awesome content on a daily basis.

[via Phandroid]

Google+ adds one-click download of Android apps is written by Craig Lloyd & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

Building off of the web search capabilities of its research pane for Docs, Google is now giving users the ability to search for and insert their own personal content. For example, if you’re working on a presentation in Drive and want to add a photo from your Picasa album, or a quote from a friend’s Google+ profile, you’ll now have the option of adding personal content from within the research pane without leaving your project. This new search feature pulls information from your personal Picasa albums, Drive and Google+ accounts, and users will also find that the research pane has been extended to Presentation and Drawings. Unfortunately, Google Apps customers will still be limited to web-only search results, as personal content search is intended for individual accounts. However, if you’re a starving student heavily embedded in Google’s ecosystem, this time saver just might shave a few minutes off of your weekend cram session and that’s always a good thing.

Filed under: Software, Google

Google research pane for Docs adds personal content, integration with Presentation and Drawing originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 31 Oct 2012 07:12:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Google has released a new version (3.2) of the Google+ app for Android and iOS. The primary change with the latest version of this app is support for Google+ pages. Now page owners can use their mobile devices to manage their pages, including making comments, creating posts, and interacting with other users.

In addition, the Android version of the app includes a new “Find People” tool, and an updated widget. The iPhone version of the Google+ 3.2 app includes the ability to edit posts, and support for iOS 6 and the iPhone 5. The tablet version of the app includes a new magazine-style layout.

The reception for this new version of the app is mixed. One common complaint that seems to be circulating through the early reviews of the apps is the unusual require of forcing a user to log out of their Google+ account and log back in under their Google+ page account in order to operate their page. So far, no official comments have been made on whether this is a temporary solution, or if there are any plans to better integrate pages into the app in the future.

What’s next? There’s been a lot of speculation that Google will be integrating their recently acquired Snapseed image app to the Google+ app. Snapseed is a competitor to the wildly popular Instagram photo app. You can download the latest Google+ app here from Play Store and iTunes.

[via Google+]

Google releases new Google+ app for Android and iOS is written by Brittany Hillen & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.