Late last year, Google launched Cursive, a note-taking progressive web app for Chrome OS that captured handwritten notes and worked offline. While many Chromebook enthusiasts have been using it already (you can manually install Cursive easily), Google has announced that formal support is rolling out to all stylus-compatible Chromebooks. The company is also highlighting other changes from the recent Chrome OS updates, including a resizable screen magnifier with improved panning and alerts if you try to use a USB Type-C cable that won't work with an external display.

Cursive

If you haven't used Cursive on your Chromebook, you can easily test it out just by navigating to the site. It partially works on other devices as well, including your desktop or laptop, though Google says that Chromebooks offer "the best experience," and notes are limited to read-only access on other devices. But the app itself is a straightforward, handrwriting-based note-taking app that lets you doodle and draw up whatever you'd like, saving content for later and organizing it into separate notebooks with features like PDF exporting.

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The feature initially launched with the HP Chromebook X2 11, and availability is now expanding to all Chromebooks with a stylus. A list of compatible devices is available, though it may not be exhaustive. And "in the coming months," Google plans to add more features to Cursive, making it easier to change the thickness, color, and style of input.

Screen magnifier

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If you use the screen magnifier accessibility feature on Chrome OS, Google would also like you to know that it's tweaking that to be resizable, so you can adjust how much of the display gets used to magnify content. Magnification panning has also been changed to support continuous panning that lets the rest of the screen follow the cursor, though you can also guide it via the keyboard.

USB cable warnings

Lastly, Google's also making it so certain Chromebook models can actively tell you if the USB Type-C cable you've plugged in is limited in a way that would prevent it from working with an external display.

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Features like USB4 and Thunderbolt require that cables meet certain specifications, but some cables aren't meant to be used for anything more than charging or basic data transfer. Sometimes cables have icons or labels indicating support for specific technologies, but it can still be hard to tell. With the new alerts, your Chromebook will just straight spit a notification that states in no uncertain terms if it doesn't work with external displays, saving you the uncertainty and frustration you might otherwise have when a cable doesn't work correctly.

Some of our readers might remember Google engineer Benson Leung, an expert on USB standards and a member of the Chrome OS team, and this is almost certainly tied to his ongoing efforts to improve the quality of the USB accessory ecosystem. Unfortunately, this feature is limited to very recent Chromebook models with 11th or 12th gen Intel Core CPUs and USB4 or Thunderbolt for now, but we're told it will come to other devices in the future.