The end is here for the Dark Sky app for Android. There’s a new version of Microsoft’s PowerToys app for Windows. Google is already working on the Pixel 5a, even though the Pixel 4a hasn’t officially been announced yet. Microsoft may be in talks to buy TikTok. And Netflix is finally building functionality into its app that people have been using third-party extensions for — playback speed controls.
Here’s a roundup of recent tech news from around the web.
- Reminder: Dark Sky for Android Dies Tomorrow [Droid Life]
Popular weather app Dark Sky goes… well, dark tomorrow. The app was purchased by Apple earlier this year. What weather app(s) are you using instead? - PowerToys v0.20.0 [Microsoft/GitHub]
Microsoft PowerToys 0.20 released with new tools and features including a color picker (Win+Shift+C to get the color from your screen), support for rendering SVG icons in File Explorer, and more. - Google ‘Pixel 5a’ makes first appearance in AOSP [9to5Google]
The Pixel 4a isn’t official yet (although an announcement is scheduled for next week), but the first signs of the Pixel 5a have shown up in Android Open Source Project code. It’s likely coming in 2021. Expect a Pixel 5 and Pixel 4a 5G before then. - Microsoft Said to Be in Talks to Buy TikTok, as Trump Weighs Curtailing App [NYTimes]
Microsoft is allegedly looking into buying TikTok, the immensely popular social media that has come under scrutiny by US officials because it’s owned by Chinese company ByteDance. - Rakuten is shuttering the online shop formerly known as Buy.com [TechCrunch]
Rakuten is shutting down its US online retail shopping site which it acquired 10 years ago… when it was still called Buy.com. Can’t help but wonder if it would have fared better under the original name. - Netflix for Android is getting playback speed controls [The Verge]
Netflix is bringing playback speed controls to its Android app, allowing users to watch videos at speeds ranging from 0.5X to 1.5X. - YouTube is ending its community captions feature [The Verge]
YouTube will end support for community-generated video captioning in September, citing spam and abuse issues and claiming the feature was infrequently used. But members of the deaf community say YouTube’s other caption tools aren’t enough. - Philo Announces Availability on Google Chromecast [BusinessWire]
$20/month Live TV streaming service Philo Connect now supports Google Chromecast. Roku, Fire TV, iOS, and Web in the future. - NVIDIA GeForce Now Steam Library Sync [NVIDIA]
NVIDIA makes it easier to sync your Steam game library with NVIDIA GeForce Now so you can stream your games over the cloud. The new feature is called Game Sync, and it’s available in version 2.0.22 of the PC and Mac app. - Play Stadia with mobile data [Google]
Google’s Stadia game streaming services ads experimental support for streaming to an Android device over 4G or 5G networks. Note that Stadia can use up to 2.7GB per hour in bandwidth, so this is probably best for folks with unlimited data plans. - How Google is bringing Windows apps to Chromebooks [The Verge]
In an interview with The Verge, a Google exec explains that Windows apps are coming to high-end Chromebooks via a partnership with Parallels that allows Windows to load inside Chrome OS. But it’ll be an enterprise feature. No word on the price or release date.
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Brad, I don’t seem to get the menu to work on my android phone. It works when I request the desktop version but not on the mobile version. I tried it on chrome, Firefox and Samsung browsers.
Huh, I’m seeing the same thing. Not sure yet what’s causing this issue, but I’m looking into it. In the meantime, a workaround is to visit the AMP version of the page. Just append ?amp to the end of any URL and the menu seems to work just fine.
For example https://liliputing.com/2020/07/lilbits-dark-sky-goes-dark-pixel-5a-powertoys-v0-20-and-game-video-streaming-updates.html?amp
Alright, I’ve got that figured out. I don’t love the solution I came up with, so there may be some more tweaking in the future, but the nav menu should work on mobile devices again. Thanks for pointing this out!
Dark Sky still works when using it via DuckDuckGo, the way I’ve always used it. On mobile, too.
One of the great features of Dark Sky was it’s UI. I’ve looked at dozens of alternate weather apps and finally came across an even better UI in ‘Foreca’.
Still evaluating the forecasts themselves but from a purely UI perspective, ‘Foreca’ is hard to beat. It’s also much less privacy invasive vs Dark Sky and many other weather apps.
I had settled on “Today Weather” but Foreca does look nice, going to give it a spin now. Thanks for sharing.
Its nice to see updates to PowerToys. Microsoft has some really handy features in that app. However, it would be nice to see some bug fixes too. It’s really buggy.
For almost a year, that program has been disabling the number-row on my keyboard. You need to disable and reenable Fancy Zones to fix it. Lots of people reporting it too.