The search monster at the Google I/O event earlier this month refreshed its social thing, Google+, with as much as 41 additional features and classy new design. Having updated the Android client last week with support for the new Google+ features, the Internet giant gave its iOS counterpart some love, bringing out such new capabilities as related hashtags, Auto Enhance for photos, the ability to edit comments and copy the post’s URL and much more…
For starters, Hangouts are no longer part of the software as Google recently moved these to a standalone app. Next up: photos. Applying some backend magic stemming from Google’s acquisition of the Snapseed photography software, Google+ now boasts the Auto Enhance feature.
So, instead of applying a few oft-used filters and operations to make your photos more vivid and life-like, the app can now automatically perform Highlight, Enhance and Awesome operations on your photos.
The results are mostly as good as if you touched up the snaps yourself. By the way, Google recently phased out Picasa Web Albums in favor of the new Google+ Photos.
You can also sort, search and share those photos, browse highlights from all your photos (Google+ automatically singles out highlights from your albums based on a number of criteria), as well as share panoramas and short animations the service creates from a batch of visually similar images.
For those using the app’s auto backup feature to beam their snaps up into the cloud, Google now gives you 15 gigabytes of free shared cloud storage for your Gmail, Google+ Photos and Drive content.
Related hashtags can be found at the top-right of individual posts (tap them to flip over the post and swipe through related posts). As an added bonus, the software now supports strikethrough text in your posts.
Oh, and I certainly like that I can finally upload a new cover photo, make edits on the go to more profile fields than before, edit comments and copy the post’s URL.
Here’s the changelog:
– New Google+ Photos features keep photos organized and looking their best
–Â Make your photos look even better with Auto Enhance
–Â Browse highlights from all your photos
–Â Share short animations, panoramas, and more
– Hangouts has moved to it’s own app for messaging and video calls
– Discover interesting content via related hashtags
– Ability to edit more profile fields and upload a cover photo
– New interactive Google Offer posts in the stream
– Control how often What’s Hot posts appear in your stream
– Support for displaying strikethrough text
– Ability to edit comments
– Ability to copy the post’s permalink
And these are your iPad screenies.
So, who’s excited about Google Offer posts in their stream? I certainly am not, though I’ll be the first to admit that Google has to make its money somehow.
I’m still waiting for the location view in the Google+ iOS app so hopefully the Mountain View folks will see to it real soon.
Google+ is free on Apple’s App Store and Google’s Play store for Android.