Dropbox Releases App for Windows Phone

Late last year Dropbox announced that they had entered into a partnership with Microsoft. When this partnership was announced, the first benefit that it brought to consumers was Dropbox integration in Microsoft Office. This allowed users to choose between using Dropbox or Skydrive as a medium for storing all of their documents in the cloud.

Today Dropbox announced the next step in this partnership with the launch of an official Dropbox application for Windows Phone. This completes support for Dropbox on devices in the Microsoft ecosystem, with a Modern UI application for Windows PCs and tablets having been available since the beginning of 2013. It has definitely taken a while for it to move to mobile, but it’s good to see another developer making apps for Windows Phone. The app is available for any users running Windows Phone 8.0 and above, and includes all the features you’d expect from Dropbox, as well as some Windows specific abilities like pinning Dropbox folders as Start Screen tiles.

Google Updates Docs Apps With Improved Functionality and Touch ID Support

Today Google has issued an update to their Docs, Sheets, and Slides applications on iOS and Android. These productivity apps were some of the first to receive Material Design visual updates last year, and so the are no major visual changes in these updates. Google has instead been focusing on bringing more features to the applications to reduce the gap between the capabilities of their productivity suite and the productivity software offered by Microsoft and Apple. There are definitely areas where Google’s apps either implement a feature in a less than optimal manner, or simply don’t have the feature at all, so it’s good to see Google improving on parts of the application that are causing frustration for users.

In terms of app functionality, the application receives a few notable upgrades. There is now real-time spell-checking in the Docs app, support for hiding your spreadsheet’s rows and columns in Sheets, and group selection of shapes in Slides. In addition, Google has also added Touch ID support for the iOS versions of the applications. It’s interesting to see Google implement another Apple specific feature in their apps, having released a Handoff capable version of Chrome for iOS just yesterday. You can see an example of group selection and Touch ID support in the screenshots above. Having to delete or move objects one by one is definitely a hassle, and so users who want to rearrange objects in their presentations will definitely appreciate that feature in particular.

The updates are available now on the App Store for iOS, and they’re rolling out on Google Play. As usual, the Google Play roll out is staggered and it might take some time to show up on your device. My devices currently only see the update for Sheets.

Google Updates Chrome for iOS With Material Design and Handoff

Google has updated Chrome for iOS to version 40, specifically version 40.0.2214.61. With it comes a number of improvements that definitely justify the major increase in version number. The headline feature of Chrome 40 is that update brings Google’s Material Design interface for Chrome to iOS. Chrome received many small Material Design additions over the course of 2014 as Google refined and slowly rolled out their new interfaces to all of their applications. There were changes to areas like the incognito tab page, the set up pages, and some of the menus, but this update finally brings completeness to these changes and makes Chrome a full Material Design application.

The new interface looks very nice, although Chrome for OS X has not received the full Material Design treatment yet so there are some differences between the appearance of Chrome on each platform. There’s also a point to be made about Google making applications that follow their own design guidelines on iOS rather than Apple’s. Having used Android Lollipop, using this new version of Chrome it almost feel like you’re running an Android application on iOS. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, and if Google brings this interface to OS X then the consistency between the two will certainly be a good thing, but it’s something to note about Google’s approach to iOS applications in general. 

Beyond changes to the visual design of the application, Chrome 40 is going to look much better for iPhone 6 and 6 Plus users in particular. This is becsuse Chrome 40 now has native layouts for the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus, which will remedy any issues with blurriness or fuzziness caused by Apple’s upscaling of the 1136×640 interface to the displays of the new iPhones.

Google has also implemented support for Handoff, which is a very exciting improvement for anyone who uses an iOS device and an OS X device. What makes it even better is that Google has implemented Handoff for Chrome on iOS so that it works with the default browser on OS X. This means that you can move from a tab in Chrome on your iPhone or iPad and pick it up in Safari on your Mac, or whatever other browser you have set as your default. Unfortunately, this can’t work both ways, and so you can’t send a tab back from Safari to Chrome on iOS. To do that you’ll need to be using Chrome on both devices.

Regardless, having a developer like Google implementing Handoff is exciting for any Mac users. Most applications that have currently adopted Handoff are those made by Mac and iOS centric developers, while bigger companies with multi-platform applications generally haven’t bothered to add support for a feature specific to a single ecosystem.

In addition to the big changes, Chrome 40 includes the various improvements to speed and reliability that most Chrome updates bring.