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Chromebooks are getting better keyboard and mouse support in games with this new change
It extends keyboard and mouse support to incompatible games
Many of us have been working from home for a long time now, and if you've got a stressful job, it's vital to take time relaxing and winding down after work. With the vast catalog of apps now available for Chromebooks thanks to the Play Store, it's easier than ever to get hooked on addictive games like PUBG or Among Us. But despite Google's efforts to optimize Android on Chrome OS, a lot of games are still incompatible with keyboard and mouse input — simply because the developers built them for phones and tablets. So if your Chromebook lacks a touchscreen, you've been out of luck. Thankfully, it looks like that may soon change.
You probably never thought you'd be making goofy GIF selfies on your Chromebook, but here we are
Google is bringing a GIF maker to your Chromebook's camera
GIFs have ruled the internet for the past three decades, and while other image file formats offer more colors and better compression, they just can't touch GIF's trump card: animation. People use these eye-catchy animations everywhere, whether expressing their mood, or reacting to a meme on platforms like Instagram or Twitter. If you're tired of using the same GIFs over and over, there are plenty of tools around for making your own animations. Soon, even your Chromebook may be lending its hand to help create your goofiest GIF yet.
Google's built-in price tracking for Chrome is inching closer to reality
It helps make shopping products at their lowest price much easier
It's no secret that we're constantly looking for ways to save our hard-earned cash when we purchase things. While there are plenty of resources to help us hunt for deals, it still requires a bit of work on our end to find the best prices. Thankfully, Google has been working to bring a price tracker to Chrome for Android, and with a future update, it could be even easier to find products at their best prices.
Google is adding a document scanner to the Chrome OS Camera app
Don't have a scanner at home? Use your Chromebook
The demand for flatbed scanners has been soaring ever since many of us started working from home because of the global pandemic. If you don't have access to that kind of hardware, being asked to sign and send a document might seem like an impossible task. Thankfully, the Chromebook you're using right now could soon double as a scanner.
It's about damn time: Your Chromebook will finally let you sort your apps in the launcher
After ignoring user feedback for years
It's no secret that your Chromebook's app launcher could use a serious user experience overhaul. As it is today, Chrome OS is devoid of any method of sorting your apps, meaning all rearrangement of your apps has to be done by hand, and it creates new pages in the launcher seemingly at random. The end result is an unusable mess, making it frustrating to find your important apps unless you use the search bar. After years of neglecting user feedback, it seems Google is finally doing something about it.
Chrome is about to be more forgiving with accidentally closing your tabs
An upcoming Chrome change instantly loads recently closed tabs
We've all made that annoying mistake of accidentally closing our Chrome browser tabs and windows. It's especially a hassle to wait for Chrome to reload them — it takes even longer depending on your network and how heavy the webpages are. Accidental closers won't have to grieve much longer, as Google is working on a nifty "magic trick" to remove the time spent waiting for Chrome to reload your tabs.
Android 12 might decouple fonts and emoji from system updates 🤯
No more waiting for system updates to get the latest emoji
Every year, the Unicode Consortium releases new sets of emoji, adding ever more options to our already big selection of smileys. Unfortunately, Android stores emoji on the system partition, along with fonts, so a full system update is required to get the latest and greatest on your phone — particularly a nuisance if your phone's manufacturer isn't known to provide fast OTAs. That might be about to change with Android 12. Some commits have been merged that would make emoji and fonts updateable without a new OS release.
ADB is the main command line tool for interacting with Android devices. It can be used to sideload APKs, copy data, and more. Starting with Android 4.0 ICS, a feature to backup and restore applications (and their data) was added, but that functionality will be removed in a future Android release.
Biometric authentication is nothing new for laptops. However, no Chromebook, even Google's flagship Pixelbook, has ever had a fingerprint sensor or facial recognition. Sure, you could use your phone's fingerprint sensor via Smart Lock, but that's just not the same. A commit for face unlock was discovered on Chromium Gerrit just a few days ago, and now, one for fingerprint sensors has been spotted as well.
Almost a year ago, evidence first appeared of an 'SMS connect' feature on Chrome OS. It would allow users to see text messages from your phone on your Chromebook, similar to Pushbullet and other software. We haven't heard much about it since then, but Google has also been working on a web client for Android Messages. Thankfully for Chrome OS users, a new commit reveals SMS Connect is one step closer to going live.
The Pixelbook sports a 12.3" 2400x1600 display, and nobody's complaining about it. In fact, we even praised it in our review for being nice in basically every aspect. But companies are constantly seeking to cram more and more pixels into their devices' screens, and Google is no different. According to a recent Chrome OS commit, we'll be seeing 4K displays on Chromebooks in the near future.
A commit made yesterday to AOSP has revealed two juicy pieces of news. The more interesting thing is also the one we know the least about: somewhere there is a device named "dorado," and we have no idea what it is. The second and more immediately understandable tidbit is that Google is adding touch support to the AOSP recovery.
Back in October, we posted a quick look at some of Google's very early plans for multi-window functionality on Android Lollipop, a feature that had apparently been in the works since at least KitKat. The system, in a nut shell, would allow users to have two apps open at a time, scaling the apps to take up more or less space on the screen, and interact with the overview or Google Search, passing text or other data back and forth.
As a developer, I absolutely love days like today. If the high-level "improves performance and stability and fixes bugs" changelog of Android 4.1.2 isn't good enough for you, how about we dive into the actual low-level source code commit logs Android engineers made into AOSP since 4.1.1_r1.1 (JRO03D) all the way through today's release 4.1.2_r1 (JZO54K). These commit logs are spread over probably 100+ repositories, so hunting for all of them manually would probably take you days. However, thanks to Al Sutton, you can check them out all in one place.
Multiple User Accounts Are Coming To Android: Miles Of Code Is Already In AOSP, And Some Of It Is Quietly Working On Devices Right Now
Multi-user support is one of the few remaining things a desktop OS can do that Android can't. The "coffee table tablet" use case would greatly benefit
Multi-user support is one of the few remaining things a desktop OS can do that Android can't. The "coffee table tablet" use case would greatly benefit from a multi-user setup, as would an enterprise user who wants to keep work and home separate. It's been a top 20 item on the Android bug tracker since the debut of Honeycomb, so there is certainly demand for it.
Have you ever wondered what the AOSP source tree would look like if someone stitched together a video of every commit, update, and release? Ponder no more, friends, because YouTube user xcco3x has made that a reality. A visually amazing 21 minute reality, to be exact.