AS USUAL, on a Friday, it’s time to trawl through the office out tray, looking for stories from the Alphabet Castle that haven’t made it on to the site otherwise. As ever, you can catch up with the longer Google-related stories from the week here.
First this week, Google Pay (hooray!). After adding a huge tranche of new US banks to its portfolio, there’s finally something that UK users can be glad about too. From next month, eBay will be able to take Google Pay instead of using PayPal to make purchases. For PayPal, we suspect this is going to hurt.
Google’s “where was this five years ago” Podcasts app, finally has a desktop player. We warn you though, it’s a bit bobbins. Hopefully, features will be added at a later date, but if you want something basic, then this could be the solution.
There’s also good news for Keep Notes, one of Google’s less popular but well-liked services. Nothing amazing – but very en vogue – there’s a dark mode in testing.
You probably already know this if it affects you, but the Admin panel for GSuite is currently borked and has been for some time. Nobody really knows why either – there’s nothing about it in the Service Status pages.
Some great news now for users of Google’s Task service. It has finally received proper integration with Google Calendar. You can schedule tasks, set them to reoccur, and paste them to Calendar. Why did nobody think to do that before?
We’re starting to get more of an idea of what Android Q will eventually look like. Two things of note – icons are changing shape. The standard is now the “squircle”. Also – you know those bubble things in Facebook Messenger. Yeah. Thank that. For everything. Also – two words….. Desktop. Mode.