Google Fit: For All Your Beta, Somewhat Accurate Fitness Needs

If you've been using an Android Wear device and wondering when that little multicolored heart icon would become useful, well, today's (kind of) your day.

Although, to be honest, the app still lies on the simple side: at the moment, it claims to track your activity while walking, biking, and running, using built-in sensors to differentiate between the three. You can add your height and weight, and there's a function for manually inputting other activities. 

Like many emerging Google products, Fit seems not quite fleshed-out, though it's certainly been treated with a nice dose of Material Design. Some users are reporting that their phones are counting their steps, despite wearing fitness bands or even Android Wear devices -- which are the devices these duties should be relegated to when possible. Hopefully, Google will fix this redundancy in a future update. 

Pushbullet Updates to Material Design

Pushbullet, the ever-useful notification mirroring service, has evolved into Google's new Material Design language, and it looks as gorgeous as you would expect. 

Aside from the generally clean and elegant look, you'll notice the Material Design elements of the card view, the transparent status bar, the toggle for Android/PC notifications, and the floating hamburger icon that we're beginning to see on more apps.

For those of you who are in the Android ecosystem but aren't familiar with Pushbullet, I almost wish I was you so that I could have the pleasure of discovering this app all over again. It's possibly the most useful third-party notification mirroring service around, making it incredibly easy to push notifications, links, and content between your various devices. To top it off, the developers are some of the most diligent and prolific in the Android world, constantly innovating upon Pushbullet and pushing frequent updates to users. 

For my uses, Pushbullet's best feature is that it eliminates the need to check a specific device to find out what notifications you've missed. Instead, those notifications are sent directly to the device you want them on: the one you're currently using. Say you're working at your desk, and you feel your phone vibrate in your pocket. Pushbullet will pop up as a Chrome notification, alerting you of exactly what happened on your phone, whether it's a Facebook wall post or a new Snap. In the case of text messages, you can even reply to the text straight from you desktop. 

Here's another use: Let's say you come across an interesting article while browsing on your phone. But look: it's seven pages long, and the site is poorly designed for mobile reading. No problem, you can push the article directly to your computer or tablet, and it will be there waiting for you when you reach that device. 

In short, Pushbullet will have you wondering how you ever navigated the internet-enabled world without it. 

Inbox: Are you on board with Google's email of the future?

Still using the Gmail app to check your email? There's a competing app now, and who better to compete with Gmail than the people who made Gmail? Inbox is what happens when you combine Gmail, Google Now, and a little touch of Material Design. But wait, there's more! If that wasn't enough Google for you in one sentence, there's one important caveat: it's only compatible with your Gmail account, for now.

Not that that's necessarily a bad thing. After all, the service is still invite-only, which has proven to be a rather (read: tremendously) successful marketing campaign for Google. Current users have each been awarded 3 invites to pass onto their friends, and they're in high demand. And if you don't have friends? Well...

The most interesting thing about Inbox is that it doesn't function as a traditional...well, inbox. It's not the familiar list of recent correspondence going from top to bottom. Instead, it's more of an interface that sorts your email into what Google hopes is a timely, pertinent to-do list. Your calendar events and Google Now reminders will show up, floating at the top when you need them. Inbox will automatically crawl your mailbox to find similar emails, sorting them into folders together. These "Bundles" can be composed of anything from receipts, to social media notifications and travel arrangements. 

And for those of you that truly enjoy the feeling of an empty mailbox, Inbox is good at that too. The aforementioned bundles make it easy to archive huge collections of email -- Google calls it the "sweep" function. I was able to quickly archive massive backlogs of email in minutes, while preserving specific emails of importance. For those emails that you know you'll need again in the future, it's easy to snooze them, which allows them to resurface again when they're relevant, whether that's by time, date, or location. 

One of the interface features you'll immediately notice is the "pin" toggle at the top right-of-center. This is the true to-do list aspect of Inbox. You can pin those emails or tasks of importance, keeping them in the pinned tab until you're ready to be done with them. This tab also includes your reminders set by Google Now.

My largest issue with Inbox is simply that I can't yet extend it to my work email, which, for task-related information, would be more helpful than my personal email account. However, the app is still in its infancy. We don't yet know what Google has planned for it. But if you're looking for a smarter way to handle your email -- or even just a pretty, Material Design alternative -- Inbox may be what you've been looking for.