The fact that more than 7 billion places globally are currently stored in Google Maps’ Saved tab tells us two things. One: There are a lot of interesting spots in the world; and two: The tab is darn popular among users.
The feature, which until February 2020 appeared in the app under the “for you” name, lets you save and manage all of the places you’re interested in, including everything from your favorite restaurants and cafes to faraway places you dream of visiting.
This week the company announced three useful improvements for the tab.
The first one makes it easier to find a place that you saved some time ago. As Google Maps product manager Greg Backstrom points out in a post highlighting the update, “It can be hard to remember what the name of the place was or what list you even saved it to. Now, your recently saved places are organized at the top of the Saved tab so you can quickly find the place you’re looking for.”
Second up, Google Maps now lets you know when you’re close to a place in your saved list. If you have a lot of places saved in your immediate area, it can take time to sort through them as you try to decide where to go. But now, if you have location permission enabled, you can see all your nearby saved places sorted by distance and arranged in a carousel, making them much easier to browse through.
Finally, the app now makes it easier to remember where you’ve been, if you happen to want to quickly pull up that data. As Backstrom explains: “If you’ve chosen to turn on your Location History setting, you can use your Timeline to remember the places you’ve been and routes you’ve taken. You can see how far you’ve biked, walked, and ran over the past few days. You can also easily find that amazing hole-in-the-wall restaurant you visited during one of your past vacations, or that cute boutique you popped into a few weeks ago. All of these insights are now organized by time, city, region, or country.”
In his post, Backstrom reveals that the most-saved place on Google Maps is currently the Eiffel Tower in Paris, France, followed by the Louvre Museum in the same city, and, in the third spot, Kiyomizu-dera, a Buddhist temple in Kyoto, Japan.
Use Google Maps? Then be sure to check out Digital Trends’ recently updated piece offering a slew of tips on how to get the most out of it.
Two new highly requested iCloud plugins just got added to ChatGPT, giving people who rely on Apple’s Mail and Calendar services a way to search emails, check appointments, and manage their schedules directly through the chatbot.
The integration is rolling out to all ChatGPT plans, including the free tier. You can access it on the web, desktop, and iOS.
Google Play is borrowing one of the Nintendo Switch’s most useful little tricks. A new Sidekick tool called Playbacks captures a short clip after something interesting has already happened, sparing players from running a screen recorder throughout an entire game.
Playbacks is part of Google Play Store v53.8 and keeps saved clips on the phone. Google first announced it earlier this month, but the new Play Store update marks its arrival for players. Anyone who has watched a perfect win vanish because the record button came too late already understands the appeal.
Samsung’s scandal over its Game Optimizing Service, or GOS, has returned with a bill attached. South Korea’s Fair Trade Commission has tentatively fined the company 20.1 billion won, or about $15.1 million, over gaming claims made for the Galaxy S21, Galaxy S22, and Tab S8.
The regulator says Samsung promoted the devices as gaming powerhouses without disclosing that GOS placed preset CPU and GPU limits on certain demanding games. Samsung disputes that conclusion, calling GOS a legitimate way to manage heat.