Gadgetory

hello again ladies and gentlemen I'm Joe Hindy the android authority app guy and welcome back to Google Play weekly as it has been the last couple of weeks google has been dominating the headlines there is a new Magic the Gathering style card game coming out of blizzard and the latest nova launcher is now in beta so you can give it a shot we have that and a lot more so let's get started and our first bit of news this week BlueStacks has been updated to ice cream sandwich I know I know it's not the most current android OS but considering the platform was running on gingerbread before it's still a pretty dramatic improvement in terms of sheer usability the service remains pretty much as it was you can still use it to download and use android applications on your computer about the only difference you'll notice our apps that you couldn't use in Gingerbread like blackberry messenger can now be used earlier this week at blizzcon it was confirmed that harston heroes of warcraft would be coming to android and iOS Blizzard chief creative officer Bob Pardo made the announcement that it would be a free-to-play card game and that would arrive sometime in quarter two of 2014 it is a card game much like magic the gathering and Pokemon so if you've played those this shouldn't be too hard to pick up and play it'll be a while before it hits Android but it does hit iPad next month and if you're lucky you can get in on the closed beta for pc and mac last week we talked about the announcement of a nova launcher update that's going to bring a whole lot of android kitkat goodness to nova launcher it's not ready for primetime yet but there is a beta that you can try out right now among other things the beta features a lot of KitKat like features such as folders the KitKat font the app drawer transparent system in nav bars where supported and others if you want to give the new Nova a try you can download it at nova launcher calm slash beta as many of you may know google bought out ways over the summer to the tune of 1 billion dollars and has been working ever since to bring ways into google maps this week Google Maps has been updated to include ways data in 46 countries to get it you just have to wait this requires no app updates or anything special it'll just start working when the rollout of the feature reaches you a couple of countries that are included are Canada and Italy among many others the best news is maps will now start giving you directions based on this new traffic info so if there is an accident on your route it'll redirect you to a different route automatically in our last bit of news this week Google search has been updated to 3.1 point 8 this is a very interesting update because it not only helps fix bugs and supported devices but also supported devices that may be running the Google Experience launcher included in the update our new google now cards and updated you I new animations and numerous fixes this means that the screwy tablet layout has finally been fixed along with the random keyboard popup issue that tablets have been seeing and the voice search force closes that everybody's been seeing it didn't fix everything but it fixed the worst problems so if you've been holding off on trying this out you're all good to go now so who wants to see some trending applications as usual if you want to give any of these a shot you can find the download links in the written companion in the video description first up is Dave frame this awesome and free app takes the idea of a photo frame and adds pretty much every feature you'll ever need in a photo frame app it's from the same people who brought us HD widgets which i use religiously on all my devices if you want to see more we did a video review and it's on our YouTube channel the camera awesome is a reportedly popular iOS camera app that's been ported to android so far reception has been both positive and negative people seem to enjoy how the app works when it actually works but hate to the interface is modeled after iOS 7 also it's not compatible with a whole lot of Android devices it is good when it works so if you don't mind wagering the three dollars on whether or not it'll actually work for you it's worth a try even though we're coming up on Thanksgiving everyone is talking about Christmas for some reason but with Thanksgiving comes Black Friday and some apps are cashing in early this includes a new app by slickdeals called the Black Friday app that surprise surprise delivers ads deals and coupons for the upcoming black friday if you plan on participating it's worth checking this app out the long awaited discount google wallet I mean Isis mobile wallet has finally been released to the masses for about ninety percent of people it's going to be garbage and it only worsens the longing for Google Wallet 2 point 0 to come out but for those privileged few that can use it without any problems it's a reasonable substitute until then it's free so there's no harm in at least trying it out last up this week is my personal favorite podcast app called pocket casts it was recently updated to its own version 4.4 which it's dubbing kentucky fried chicken with the update comes a couple of KitKat only features and a few more changes and updates that are for everyone if you need a new podcast app this is the one we recommend once again I'm Joe Hindy the android authority app guy and this has been Google Play weekly feel free to subscribe to our YouTube channel and don't forget to tune in next week for our next episode the written companion and the social media links are in the no description thank you for watching and have a wonderful day