What updates should Android developers focus on from Google I/O?
In this video, Android Engineer Kris Pena picks out the most important pieces of information that came out of this year's Google I/Oconference.
She dissects all the changes to Android app permissions, like prompting users just to allow ccess to location services or cameras in real time, versus presenting them with a long list of permissions before an install.
She also discusses some of the exciting new APIs released with the Android M preview, as well as Google's new Design Support Library, which makes it easier for designers to implement many of the features of material design without a lot of extra work.
Enjoy, and don't forget to subscribe to our Ask a Dev YouTube channel to catch more videos like this.
5 can't-miss apps: Kiwi for Gmail, Disney Gif, Medium and more
Between iTunes showcasing LGBT pride and Facebook's rainbow-filtered profile photos, you may have missed some of this week's best new apps.
SEE ALSO: Breakup app delivers the ugly truth so you don't have to
Luckily, each weekend, we round up a few of our favorite new and updated apps. This week's list includes a GIF keyboard app from Disney, a new Gmail app for Mac, Dropbox's redesigned Android app and more.
Check out the gallery, below, to see our top picks. If you're looking for more, take a look at ourlast roundup of can't-miss apps.
Disney Gif
Disney now has a way for you to easily find animated GIFs from all your favorite Disney and Pixar titles, including Star Wars. Disney Gif puts some of Disney’s best moments right on your keyboard.
Keep an eye on: The app, along with the vast majority of its GIFs, are free, though there are some additional GIFs available through in-app purchases from the main Disney GIF app.
Pro-tip: Like all iOS keyboard apps, you have to enable Disney Gif through your device’s settings menu. To preview an individual GIF, hold down on a thumbnail to see the full version play out.
Free: iOS
IMAGE: DISNEY
Dropbox
Dropbox’s Android app got a major overhaul this week, with a new update that brings the app in line with Google’s Material Design language. The latest version of the app has also improved its search and made it easier to navigate between files.
Keep an eye on: The app now lets you snap photos from within the app and it automatically saves the image to that folder.
Pro-tip: The app’s search function also allows you to search within the text of documents stored on your account.
Free: iOS and Android
IMAGE: DROPBOX, INC.
Kiwi for Gmail
The Kickstarter-backed desktop Gmail client finally landed on the Mac App Store this week. With support for multiple email accounts (including Google Apps), notifications, Hangouts, Google Drive attachments, it comes pretty darn close to feeling like a native app from Google itself.
Keep an eye on: The company says it will be adding support for popular Gmail extensions like Boomerang in a future update.
Pro-tip: For when you want to get away from your inbox for a bit, the “Zen” switch helps you tune it all out by disabling notifications and email accounts to reduce distraction.
$9.99: Mac (Lite version; free)
IMAGE: ZIVE, INC.
Medium
Medium has finally released the official version of its Android app. It allows you to browse posts published on the platform, check out your reading list and write and publish new posts of your own.
Keep an eye on: Your regular reading list is still available within the app and you can search for new content, though right now search is limited to specific stories, though Medium says it’s working on new options.
Pro-tip: Drafts you write in the app can’t be viewed or published from the web so make sure to fine tune your text within the app as much as possible.
Free: iOS and Android
IMAGE: A MEDIUM CORPORATION
Stack Heroes
Part Jenga, part physics game, the goal of Stack heroes is to perfectly place the falling blocks into a perfect stack.
Keep an eye on: As the game progresses, blocks fall faster and faster and become much more difficult to control.
Pro-tip: Knocking over a few blocks at a time can sometimes work in your favor: A well-placed block can sometimes knock over problematic areas of the structure.
A key component of being professional is organisation, yet many business practices seem outdated and cumbersome in today's technology-driven world. From holding onto receipts for expense reporting to filing business cards away for networking opportunities, there's a lot to keep track of. It's time to simplify.
SEE ALSO: Don't panic: 6 tips for being productive without Wi-Fi
1. TripIt
Travel can be stressful, and travel for business even more so. TripIt alleviates this stress by compiling all of your travel documents in one place to create a business trip itinerary. Simply forward all of your confirmation emails, including flights, restaurant reservations and car rentals, to the TripIt address and the app automatically organises your schedule — putting your entire trip in one, easily accessible place.
The app removes the need to flip through various inboxes, remember passwords or add travel dates and details to your calendar. This master itinerary includes time, date and confirmation numbers as well as weather predictions, driving directions and maps. Synced throughout your devices, your travel plans are also available offline, so you can reference your outlined journey while on the go or in the air.
2. Waze
IMAGE: WINDOWS PHONE APP STORE WAZE
When you’re driving somewhere unfamiliar you may not know the shortcuts, and when it come to business, being professional and on time go hand in hand. If traffic gets in your way, Waze helps you get around it, showing you alternative routes vetted by other drives on the road with you. Warnings from fellow drivers let you avoid accidents, road debris and even speed traps, making your daily commute or business trip more efficient and timely. These shorter routes can even save you money on gas.
The voice command navigation calculates the fastest route based on community-sourced information that updates in real-time. When you pass a reported obstacle or accident, the app asks you to vet the information and in-turn help those en route behind you. Talk about paying it forward.
3. Expensify
Streamline your expense reports with Expensify by citing, photographing and curating your expenses on the go. No more receipts to keep filed away for the end of the month, simply take a picture and throw them away thus keeping your expenses up-to-date. Forward any electronic receipts or confirmations to the designated address for easy additions to the pre-existing records.
Working from home or remotely? The app also reports hours worked with associated pay rate and tracks your miles driven, flight itinerary and travel arrangements. Easily submit your expenses at the end of the month without hassle.
4. Job Compass
IMAGE: WINDOWS PHONE APP STORE JOB COMPASS
Time for a career change? Maybe you're moving to a new city or just looking for new opportunities. Find job openings based on location using Job Compass. Simply enter your desired zip code and search terms and you’re on your way to a new job.
With millions of listings in over 55 countries, Job Compass streamlines your job search by narrowing the scope and helping you find your next move. Sourced from non-location focused job boards like Indeed.com, the listings on Job Compass are organized visually to help you see your professional future on a map.
5. Track My Life
Figure out where you spend your time using Track My Life. The app runs automatically in the background of your phone and determines your travel, what locations you are at most frequently, and from this, creates data that you can use to maximize your time and daily efficiency. This app doesn't only help you streamline your professional life, but also helps you find any imbalances in your daily schedule and make simple changes.
It quantifies your daily routine in a way that provides concrete room for alterations. Maybe you travel too much, or haven't taken a vacation day in the last year. If working in an hourly or travel-heavy position, use Track My Life to ensure you are earning maximum compensation for your daily work. Overtime, you can track gradual lifestyle changes, or find where they may be needed.
6. CamCard
IMAGE: WINDOWS PHONE APP STORE CAMCARD
Make professional networking easier with digital business card storage on CamCard. Exchange e-business cards with QR code scanning, save paper cards by taking photos and store all of your contacts in one place that syncs to the cloud, making it easily accessible from any device.
Rather than enter contact information into your phone manually from a business card, simply snap a photo and watch as the information is generated into a CamCard contact listing where you can make notes, tag, search and share cards. CamCard and electronic business cards save money, time and paper while simplifying the social side of your professional life.
You might not think fashion and the hoodie-dominated world of technology would mix. Technology is often focused on efficiency, while fashion is about self-expression and exuberance.
A number of Australian entrepreneurs are working on bringing fashion, beauty and technology together, from helping women customise shoes online they actually want to wear, to streamlining the process of booking salon appointments with a mobile app.
SEE ALSO: A new algorithm for Instagram helps you make your friends jealous of your fashion sense
Three Aussie women using their business and style savvy to unite fashion and technology include: Jodie Fox, cofounder of shoe design platform Shoes of Prey, Jessica Wilson, cofounder of fashion discovery app Stashd, and Lauren Silvers, founder of salon appointment booking app Glamazon.
Jodie Fox, Shoes of Prey
Since it was founded in Sydney in 2009, Shoes of Prey has gone global.
The multi-platform app, which lets women design shoes online down to the shade of leather and have them mailed to their door, just opened a global headquarters in Los Angeles and announced a partnership with the U.S. department store, Nordstrom.
Founded by Jodie Fox, 33, along with Michael Fox and Mike Knapp, the business broke even in about two months, Fox said. That's when the founders knew they were onto something. "We were giving women the opportunity to be stylish, and to have something they were comfortable in," Fox told Mashable Australia.
With a background in law and advertising, Fox said she had always wanted her own business. Mixing fashion and technology, however, was left of field. "We used to go head to head about whether [Shoes of Prey was] a technology company or a fashion company," she said. "We didn't realise we were both."
Jodie Fox, cofounder of Shoes of Prey.
IMAGE: SHOES OF PREY
The company believes the fashion model is broken. "We see all these extraordinary designers put in the position of having to manufacture thousands of collections that people may or may not want to buy," she said. "It ends up causing this huge challenge in terms of waste, and ... people regard things in this disposable manner."
Technology fits perfectly into this equation — with its digital platform, Shoes of Prey is able to give people access to the exact product they want, without bulk manufacturing.
Fox thinks fashion, beauty and technology will need each other, especially as wearables develop. "Technology can make these amazing products we put on our body like Google Glass," she said. "But it needs fashion to make it something we would actually wear."
For others hoping to enter the fashion and tech space, Fox has some advice: Do everything before you're ready. "You learn a ton more by doing things than you ever do by planning," she said. And don't be afraid to admit you don't know what you don't know. "People are generous in giving you time and advice if you're confident enough to go and ask for it," she added.
Jessica Wilson, Stashd
Business and fashion both come naturally to Jessica Wilson, 23, cofounder of fashion discovery platform, Stashd. It was technology that was the steep learning curve.
A "global, virtual mall on your mobile," the Stashd iPhone app (with Android and Windows Mobile apps in the works) lets users swipe through clothes, save images and make purchases.
Wilson's entrepreneurial spirit started early. Growing up on a farm in Coffs Harbour, New South Wales, she founded a company when she was 16 hosting formal after parties for different local high schools, she told Mashable Australia.
She later worked at the Australian, New York and Paris fashion weeks for different designers and PR companies, but decided to take a career U-turn in 2013 and booked a one way ticket to Silicon Valley without knowing a single person. "It was about putting myself in the right situation," Wilson said. She went to launches and networking drinks and even met one of her main business mentors in the girl's bathroom at an event.
IMAGE: STASHD
On her return to Sydney in 2014, she moved into the technology coworking space, Fishburners. That's when she got started translating the process of browsing in a brick and mortar store to a smartphone. Now working with over 3,000 brands globally, including Net-A-Porter, Asos and General Pants Co., the app aims to change the way people shop online.
Until this point, the startup has been funded through sales — depending on the store, Stashd makes between 8% and 20% a sale — but the company plans to raise investment cash in the coming months to fund further expansion.
Wilson's even shooting a pilot for a reality TV show about her journey as a female startup founder. "I want to show how real it is being an entrepreneur," she said. "It's not just all the hype people see in the media. You have extreme highs and extreme lows and you pivot almost weekly."
Jessica Wilson, cofounder of Stashd.
IMAGE: STASHD
When starting out, Wilson advises entrepreneurs to ask questions of people who know more than them. "When I entered from the fashion space, I didn't know much about tech," she said. "Meet people in the space and ask them questions you think are stupid."
"The fashion industry has problems to solve, and tech can solve those problems," she said.
Lauren Silvers, Glamazon
Lauren Silvers, 25, came up with the idea for Glamazon in early 2013, when she found it frustrating to connect with salons for last minute haircuts or manicure appointments.
While working in PR in New York, she was using apps like Seamless and Uber, and that gave her the idea for a platform that connected clients with beauticians on-demand, Silvers toldMashable Australia.
Before launching the Glamazon iPhone app in June 2014 — you can also book on the company's website, with an upcoming Android app — Silvers spent months learning about the startup scene.
While having always been business minded — she started a dog walking service at age nine — she didn't even know what the term "startup" meant when she developed the idea for Glamazon. "All I knew was I had this vision of how girls could connect with beauty salons," she said. "I'm not a tech person, but I believe in outsourcing all your weaknesses."
The Glamazon app.
IMAGE: GLAMAZON
Within six months of launch, after working with part-time developers on the app, she had more than 140 vetted salons signed up across Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane. Now Glamazon has over 5,000 customers, with most located in Sydney. The company takes a 15% commission off every transaction, but salons don't pay to be on the platform and the app helps them fill empty session times.
The goal in 2015 is to launch GLAMfit, Silvers said. The company has found users of Glamazon are also interested in fitness and health, so the platform will help people book last minute yoga, pilates or personal trainer sessions.
Glamazon owes a lot to a collaborative approach, Silvers said. Her advisory board, with members who are involved in companies like Uber, Peasy.com and H2Coco, has been integral to the startup's growth. "Without my mentors and advisors, it would have taken me longer," she said. "I would have gotten there, but these are people who have seen it all before, so why not tap into their knowledge?"
Lauren Silvers, founder of Glamazon.
IMAGE: GLAMAZON
Word of mouth marketing has also paid off for Glamazon. She's found reaching out to Instagram celebrities with the offer of free appointments, such as Australian actress Charlotte Best and health blogger Jessica Sepel, really helpful. "There's so much marketing out there these days, a personal endorsement really cuts through," she added.
That's not to say startup life has been easy. "You can kiss a nine-to-five, five-day-a-week lifestyle behind," Silvers said. "You work whenever you need to work." While putting everything into Glamazon means she's living with her parents, it's still been immensely rewarding. "It's so fulfilling to see what I'm doing come to fruition," she said.
Snapchat's photos might disappear seconds after its young users open them, but keeping the young social network afloat requires advertising that stick in their minds a little longer than that.
In turn, Snapchat's audience offers an alluring prospect to the advertising industry, which yearns for ways to tap into the overwhelmingly young user base that has flocked to the ephemeral image sharing app.
SEE ALSO: Apple's new Safari will let you block ads, which makes some people happy and some people very scared
That's why the company's 25-year-old CEO and founder Evan Spiegel travelled to Cannes, France this week to pitch his burgeoning advertising business at the industry's biggest party of the year. Cosmopolitan editor Joanna Coles sat down with the Stanford dropout during Monday's keynote before a crowd full of ad execs to talk about Snapchat's new vertical video ads, the company's experimentation in the space and — perhaps inevitably — dick pics.
During the chat, Spiegel outlined some of the ways he wants Snapchat to flout the current vogue in social media and mobile advertising.
For one, he wants to put an end to the long-held notion that video is better viewed in landscape. Vertical videos can be just as effective, he says, without requiring users to tilt their phone — it's just a matter of making creative use of the available space. Snapchat's users have been recording and viewing videos in portrait-mode in years, so the platform is well-positioned to pioneer the trend.
Snapchat uses different perspectives within the same screen to take full advantage of the vertical layout.
But the nature of Snapchat's quick-vanishing and semi-anonymous platform also means that the company can't dig up the kind of data on its users' interests and demographics that other social networks can.
That's okay though, Spiegel says, because he doesn't want to his company to be "creepy" anyway. The sentiment turns what some marketers see as a drawback in Snapchat's lack of targeting power into a stand against intrusive online marketing that makes people wary about privacy.
"We really care about not being creepy,” he said, according to Venture Beat. “That’s really important to us.”
Spiegel delved more into his vertical video ad plan in a video released in conjunction with his appearance. Sitting cross-legged in an armchair amidst an unusually drab office setting for a $16-billion tech company, the young founder refers to targeted ads as a thing of the past, casting Snapchat's flashy videos as the way into the future.
"In the early days of Internet advertising, marketers relied on things like targeting to differentiate ad products that weren't very engaging," Spiegel says in the video.
Spiegel also had a word of advice to the brands that clutter your Twitter timeline with overly friendly unsolicited overtures: take it easy.
"We think it's weird when brands try to act like your pal. I think there's some nuance — I think it's very important to be friendly, but not a buddy," Spiegel said, per Business Insider.
Instead, brands should concentrate on building more context around their message, he says, pointing to an ad campaign Snapchat ran with P&G this last weekend that worked the company's brand into four videos of fathers playing with kids as an example of this strategy in action.
But for all Spiegel's high-minded talk, will Snapchat be able to deliver on his trend-bucking promises? The company's recent experimentation in different kinds of ad formats suggests it may be on track.
Re/Code reported last week that the company may pull in up to $400,000 per day for ads mixed into its Live Stories—the montages of user-submitted photos and videos that document high-profile events like Coachella or presidential campaign rallies.
Snapchat runs similar ads alongside its Discover platform, which it launched in partnership with media brands as a bid to make the app a destination for news and media content.
The company is also testing out ways of getting users to actively engage with brands. Last week, the company brought advertising to its geo-filters — the location-specific themes that users can use to decorate photos in the vicinity of certain attractions — with a McDonald's campaign that lets Snapchatters adorn their posts and messages with Big Macs, fries and golden arches.
But even these experiments are just the tip of the iceberg of what the company's ads operation is dreaming up, Spiegel said. The company only ends up rolling out "maybe 1%" of the products it develops, he says.
“We build stuff all the time that’s never released," Spiegel said. "It’s just terrible.”
