Google Maps has revolutionized how we explore the world, offering instant access to locations, directions, and real-time information. Beyond its navigational prowess, it holds a treasure trove of historical data, allowing us to witness the evolution of our surroundings. Paired with Google Earth Pro, these tools provide a powerful window into the past.

As Vinay Shet, Product Manager at Google Street View, says, If you’ve ever dreamt of being a time traveler like Doc Brown, now’s your chance. You can now travel to the past to see how a place has changed over the years by exploring Street View imagery in Google Maps for desktop. We’ve gathered historical imagery from past Street View collections dating back to 2007 to create this digital time capsule of the world.

Here’s a step by step breakdown of how you can explore historical imagery using Google Maps:

Foundation of Street View:

• Google Maps’ Street View, a feature that provides 360-degree panoramic street-level views, is the basis for its time-travel capability. Google’s Street View cars have meticulously captured images across countless locations, creating a rich archive of visual data.

Focus on Street View:

• Google Maps’ “time travel” feature primarily works within Street View. This allows you to see how street-level imagery has changed over the years.

How to access it:

1. First, locate the area you wish to explore in Google Maps.
2. Drag the orange “Pegman” icon to the desired street. This will activate Street View.
3. Look for the “See more dates” option, typically located near the top-left corner of the Street View window.
4. This will display available historical Street View images, allowing you to browse through different time periods.
5. By clicking on the different available images, you can then see the street view as it was at that point in time.

Limitations:

• Availability of historical Street View imagery varies. Not all locations have extensive historical records.
• The depth of historical data depends on when Google’s Street View cars captured images in that area.

By utilizing these features, you can embark on a virtual journey through time, witnessing the evolution of our planet and its landscapes.

Google Photos is coming up with one of the best editing features that was earlier being offered exclusively to its Pixel users – Magic Eraser.

The Magic Eraser tool of Google Photos uses AI to remove unwanted content from your images. Magic Eraser detects distractions in your photos, like photobombers or power lines, so you can remove them in just a few taps. You can also circle or brush other things you want to erase and Magic Eraser will make them disappear.

These features are starting to roll out today in Google Photos for Google One members on all plans and all Pixel users. This is applicable to the iOS Google One members as well!

Now you can stop cursing the photobombers and simply kick them off your pics!

Digilocker, the cloud storage platform for all Government issued official documents in India is soon going to be integrated into the Files app in Android. Now Digilocker users on Android can directly access official government issued documents, straight from their Files app.

Google made the announcement during the annual Google for India event. “We expect that DigiLocker’s integration and partnership on Android will drive smoother and ubiquitous access to digitised documents in a safe and secure manner for all our users” Abhishek Singh, President and CEO, NeGD and MyGov, MD and CEO, Digital India Corporation, said in a statement.

Google will make the Digilocker issued files accessible only with a secure password, inside the Files app.

DigiLocker has more than 137 million registered users who have issued more than 5.6 billion documents to date.

Google is yet to disclose the date of launch and support for iOS.

Google, like every year, has announced the most awaited Android app of the year 2022 awards! The awards themselves were given as best Android Game of the year 2022 as well as best Android App of the year 2022 separately, keeping in line with the target audience for the same.

Google said, “this year we relied on apps to keep us connected and explore new worlds. We found comfort in entertainment, value in learning new skills, and inspiration in everyday routines. That’s why these are Play’s best apps of 2022“.

And the best Android app of the year 2022 overall is Dream by WOMBO.

With Dream by WOMBO, you can create beautiful artwork using the power of AI! Enter a prompt, pick an art style and watch Dream by WOMBO turn your idea into an AI-powered painting in seconds.

WOMBO AI is a Canadian artificial intelligence company transforming the ways that entertainment and AI work together. WOMBO Dream is expanding art to the masses. You don’t need a paint brush, pencil, or any art supplies to make beautiful artwork, all you need is an idea.

Along with the overall winner, Google also announced winners in speicifc categories…

Best Android app of the year 2022 for fun : PetStar

Best Android app of the year 2022 for Personal Growth : Breathwrk

Best Android app of the year 2022 for Everyday Essentials : Plant Parent

Best Android app of the year 2022 in the hidden gems category : Recover Athletics

Best Android app of the year 2022 for good : The STIGMA App

Best Android app of the year 2022 for wear : Todoist

Best Android app of the year 2022 for tablets : Pocket

Google also introduced a new category this year, with their focus being across various platforms where Android works…

Best Android app of the year 2022 for Chromebooks : BandLab

Google, in collaboration with Samsung, has come up with their new Google Health Connect app, now in Beta. It’s the one app that can track all the health and fitness data coming in from multiple other apps which track their own devices respectively.

So I used to have Google Fit to track my runs, Fitbit to track my Heart Rate, WeightWatchers to track my weight and so on. However, with all my fitness data fragmented across apps, I would never have one wholesome view of all my Health data. To answer this problem, Google has launched Health Connect by Android, giving me a simple way to share data between my health, fitness, and wellbeing apps without compromising on privacy.

Whether you’re focused on activity or sleep, nutrition or vitals, sharing data between your apps can help you better understand your health. Health Connect gives you simple controls, so you only share the data you want to. Health Connect stores the health and fitness data from your apps in one place, offline and on your device, so you can easily manage the data from your different apps.

At launch, more than 10 health, fitness, and wellness apps will support Health Connect, including Fitbit, Samsung Health, MyFitnessPal, Oura, and Peloton.

For users, one can easily manage permissions in a single place, with granular controls to see which apps are accessing data at any given time. Android users will now be able to sync and get credit for their Peloton workouts in apps like Oura, MyFitnessPal, WeightWatchers and Lifesum. Now, through a single integration with Health Connect, Peloton Members will have the option to share their workout stats across the ecosystem of apps they use to support their overall wellness.

For developers, the new app reduces the cost of building multiple API connections for data sharing between different apps. Now, with Health Connect, building an integration with a new app is as simple as reading in new data from Health Connect, rather than building a whole new integration. Health Connect’s data schema supports more than 40 data types across six categories to ensure data consistency across apps.

Amazon Photos app for Android offers unlimited storage space for any resolution for its Prime members! While it is limited to 5GB for other free users.

Remember those good old days, prior to July 2021, when Google Photos used to allow unlimited storage for photos. Unfortunately, since then, Google stopped the unlimited storage offering, and instead limited it to the overall 15GB Google account storage limit and started to encourage everyone to buy storage using their Google One platform.

With over 200 million users having Amazon Prime subscription, it certainly feels like atleast one member of a family across the world (where Amazon operates its Prime subscription services) might be having a Prime subscription. And Amazon has announced that every Prime member can share their unlimited storage benefits with upto 5 others, thats a market of a whooping 1 billion people who are eligible for the unlimited storage!

Amazon Photos Features

• Unlimited storage is obviously the hilghlight of the offering
• Auto-save photos for easy backup and to free up memory on your phone – So you don’t forget to sync your photos online
• Back up your photos and videos securely with Amazon – so you don’t have to worry for the safe keeping of your favorite memories
• Share photos and albums via SMS, email, and other apps
• See your photos on your Fire TV, tablet, computer, or on the Echo Show, where available
• Organization – They offer some really interesting ways to organize the photos and to be able to search them easily by keyword, location, and more

Time to download Amazon Photos app and share your reviews in the comments!

During Apple’s iPhone 14 launch even in August, Apple had announced Dynamic Island as “the biggest change to the face of iPhone since we went all screen“. Ever since then, like any other iPhone features, even this feature, has been praised by some, while criticised by many!

And as this was afterall a software related interface tweak, it wouldn’t have been long before this feature would come to Android. And the good news is that it already has!

With the newly launced dynamicSpot – Multitasking, the developers of the app have brought this very hyped feature of iPhone 14, to your own Android device. Infact to make things even more exciting, dynamicSpot actually gives you more than what iPhone 14’s dynamic Island has to offer, as you can customize your interactions to set when and the island should show up and when not!

With dynamicSpot you can easily get the iPhone 14 Pro Dynamic Island feature on your device! dynamicSpot gives you Dynamic Island mini multitasking feature, making it easier to access recent notifications or phone status changes. Just tap on the little black popup to open the displayed app, long press the popup to expand it and view more details.

As dynamicSpot uses Android’s notification system it is compatible with almost all apps, like messaging notification, timer apps and even music apps!

Over the years, there have been multiple social media applications starting from the success of Orkut to the market leader Facebook, from the innovative Twitter, which brought in the concept of micro blogging to TikTok. Now wishing to get their share in this social media industry is Crowwd.

Over the past few years, ever since the Indian government has been pushing for “Make in India” applications, we have seen the birth of new age applications like the Koo app, which is a competitor to Twitter and the Digiboxx, which is almost a competitor to Google Drive. Riding on the same bandwagon comes Crowwd, as they advertise the fact that it is “Made in India” right on the splash page of their app!

The signup process is quite straight forward, however it is mandatory to signup with your mobile number as they send you an OTP in order to verify and login. Once signed up and logged in, you are onboarded through a series of screens to choose your interests, based on which you are recommended a selection of Communities that you could join.

When you look at the choice of communities, they mostly seem to be professional communities including College, organization, hacker clubs, programming clubs, etc. Wonder if creating a new community has any approval process involved!

Once you are done going through signup screens, you land onto a screen which would remind you of our age old Facebook Feeds! There is some new nomenclature here though. The tabs are called Explore, My feeds and Confessions.

Crowwd provides channels that are like a group messaging platform which brings your community members to a single place, helping them share interesting thoughts and ideas with each other. Create your own public/private channel and bring your audience on board to get a whole new experience.

There may be many apps on Playstore that help you in setting up reminders for different habits that you plan on inculcating in your day to day life, but we can tell one thing for sure, there is no app as intuitive as the Otternal Life app.

The first thing that will catch your eyes and get you stuck with the app is the very first onboarding steps that you take to create your first habit. It might just remind you of your childhood days when you’d always have a toy to talk to and guide you to do stuff!

Features

• Extremely user friendly and fun to setup
• Intuitive user interface
• Can created unlimited habits
• Can setup reminders for each of the habits
• Get notified with reminders
• Write your own journal at the end of the day
• Track your progress on the built in calendar
• Absolutely free, no ads
• Works offline, no internet connectivity required

Get the Otternal life app!