Google has announced the Chrome OS 102 update for Chromebooks with new features. With the latest update, the tech giant is rolling out its note-taking app Cursive to all Chromebooks that work with a stylus. It launched the Cursive app to select devices last year.
“The Cursive app makes it easy to capture, edit and organise handwritten notes on your Chromebook,” it said in a blog post. Beyond handwritten notes, users can also sketch out drawings, or paste images within their notes. They can also sort notes into custom notebooks for different projects and can quickly copy and paste their notes into another app or send a PDF.
“If you write a sentence that fits better on a different part of the page, that’s not a problem – easily move it by circling the content on the page and dragging it to wherever you like. Didn’t quite perfect your drawing the first time? Erase it by scribbling over it with your stylus,” it added.
To create space for adding more notes to the top of the page, users can draw a horizontal line and drag the content down to free up more space. In the coming months, it will also introduce features for more personalisation, like more easily changing the thickness, style, and color of the stylus stroke.
“Cursive will be preinstalled on all eligible Chromebooks – just tap the Everything Button and search for the app – or you can download it by going to cursive.apps.chrome and tap “install” in the toolbar,” it said.
Other features
Other new features added with the update include improvements to magnification and panning. Google is rolling out magnification customisation on Chromebooks. Currently, the docked magnifier feature creates a split screen where the bottom half is the standard screen, and the top half is the zoomed-in version of the screen.
With the new update, users can control the size of the magnified portion of the screen. “You can make it larger if you want to see more zoomed-in content, or smaller if you want to see more of the standard screen. You can adapt it to fit your preferences, or adjust based on the content you’re looking at,” it said.
It has also made updates to the panning experience recently. With continuous panning, when users move their cursor the rest of the screen will follow it. They can also use their keyboard to control panning by pressing ctrl + alt + arrow keys. It has also added alerts for USB-C cables with limited functionality.
With this, eligible Chromebooks will notify users if the USB-C cable that they are using won’t support displays or isn’t performing ideally for their laptop. They will also receive a notification if the cable that they are using doesn’t support the high-performance USB4/Thunderbolt 3 standards that their Chromebook does.
This feature is available on Chromebooks with 11th or 12th-generation Intel Core CPUs with USB4 or Thunderbolt capability, with more devices to be added.
Published on
May 29, 2022
