CNN for Samsung gets support for Android Nougat.

CNN has updated there app for Samsung devices today that adds support for Android Nougat, Android latest iteration. As you probably know, Samsung has been late in pushing Nougat to the S7 series of Galaxy devices, namely the S7 and S7 Edge, with deployment limited to a few countries so far. I am still waiting for my Galaxy S7 Edge to get the update to enjoy the new stuff in Nougat. In addition, the phone is also missing out on some security patches, the last ones were the November 2016 patches. That's how life is outside the Nexus realm.

Do you own a Galaxy S7 device? Did you get the Nougat update yet?

CNN for Samsung can be downloaded or upgraded in Google Play Store.

Android Keyboard updated with new color palette and more.

Up until today, Google Keyboard for Android devices did not offer much in terms of customization besides switching between light and dark themes. An anomaly for a platform that is known first for being the most open OS to customization. Google has been working to fix that for a while and you would know if you signed up to join the Android Nougat beta program,because the new features in today's update are already baked into Nougat. Let's see what's in there for non-Nougat devices. There is a few minor updates for Nougat as well. See the bottom of this post for the change log.

With this update you will get more than the light and dark themes to choose from. As can be seen in the screenshot of my Nexus 6 keyboard settings, you'll get a new palette of colors to pick from and make your keyboard all colorful. And there's more there for you as Google lets you use an image as your keyboard background. A feature I suspect will be very popular for users. Now, if only Google could make this setting easily accessible in the device settings, that would be awesome. It's kind of buried right now, though I doubt that will be a deterrence.

The update also brings new gesture typing and suggestions in a bunch of new languages, new layout support, bug fixes and Android N support. See the detailed change log and head over to Google Play store to download the Keyboard app. Happy customization!

• Themes: Customize keyboard with favorite photos or colors

• Gesture typing & suggestions in: Albanian, Arabic, Basque, Bosnian, English (Australia), English (India), Esperanto, Irish, Javanese, Mongolian, Montenegrin (Cyrillic, Latin), Nepali, Portuguese (Africa), Sundanese, Tajik, Tatar, Zulu

• Layout support: Burmese, Southern Sotho, Turkmen, Urdu, Welsh, Xhosa

• Add recent emoji to suggestion strip

• Bug fixes, including passwords with Talkback and missing key labels

• Support Android N

Google adds multi-window and Direct Boot support to the Clock app for Android N.

I don't use the Android default Clock and I doubt anyone does. But it is an undeniable fact that alarm clocks are one of the most important tools on our phones. Without it we would end up late at work among other things. I personally use Timely as my alarm clock for its Smart Rise feature and colorful design. Bitspin, the company that developed Timely, was acquired by Google in 2014. Google, despite acquiring Timely, has kept the default Clock on Android along with Timely in the store and today, the company has updated Clock with some nice features that very few will take advantage of.

In this update, Google added support for Android N. The company made the name of the next version of Android public a few weeks ago and it's still referring to it as N instead of Nougat, the official name. With support for Nougat, Google added multi-window support. But the most important interesting feature in this update is Direct Boot support. If your phone restarts during the night, your phone running Android Nougat will still deliver your alarms. That's basically what other alarm apps do.

The last item in the change log is a feature that will warn you when your alarms are somehow silenced by device settings. All in all this update brings some nice features to an ordinary clock app. The only problem with that is they are available only to users running Android Nougat Beta on their devices, which currently are Nexus phones and a Sony Experia device.

Download Android Clock app in Google Play.

Shifty Jelly lays "groundwork for some cool things" for future releases of Pocket Casts and Android N.

Shifty Jelly, the developer behind popular podcast app Pocket Casts for Android, seems totally unfazed by the release today of Google's own podcast app, an app that is currently available in the U.S. and Canada only. Instead Shifty Jelly has plans to make its app even cooler and this release does include some stuffs to lay the groundwork for future releases. Other than that, this update contains the following features:

• Added skip back to now playing notification.
• Reworked a lot of underlying code to prepare for a tastier future.
• New sleep timer animation.

Shifty Jelly has picked Nougat or Nutella as the possible names for the future release of Android and the team is already salivating no matter which name is picked by Google. Nougat, Nutella or an Indian dessert, the developers behind my favorite podcast app are all fired up and ready for it. That's what makes Pocket Casts a cool podcast app that can be purchased on Google Play store. Pocket Casts costs about $3 and is well worth the purchase.