Google released a new app today called Creative Preview that is designed to let developers preview ads before they push them out to their apps. This doesn’t seem like a big deal, but it is. Unless you build apps, though, you won’t have much use for Creative Preview. You may notice its effects, however. There’s nothing worse than poorly implemented ads in an ad-supported app. Consumers often will uninstalled apps simply because of the horrible ad implementation.
Creative Preview uses Google’s Mobile Ads SDK to preview ads on a device before it’s implemented and pushed out to users. The ads in the app are called ‘creatives’ and can be imported from DoubleClick Studio to your Android device to see how they look. Ads, or creatives, can also be added manually using a JavaScript URL. The idea is to test out ads and make sure they fit properly in a given screen size, as well as ensure that they are named and display the way they should. Creative Preview won’t be one of the most popular downloads in the Google Play Store, but it will be helpful to developers. We will all reap the benefits of the app, for sure. The app is in beta right now. For those who are interested it is available in the Play Store via the source link below.
There’s a good reason that Wednesday’s are known as Update Wednesday at Google. The company updated Hangouts to version 3.0 today and added some new visuals to the Play Store app in an update as well. The new Hangouts should fix some nasty bugs in the settings, as well some stability and performance improvements and a new and improved contact card feature. I’ve had an issue with the Hangouts settings randomly resetting themselves and that seems to be fixed with the v3.0 update. The Play Store update adds some tweaked visual and some changes to the action bar, in addition to some notification options and extra functionality. Like Creative Preview, neither of these updates are big, but they will be noticeable.