Home > News

New ChromeOS Productivity Features Help Chromebook Compete

By Laura Tucker
Chromeos New Productivity Features Featured

The tech world has become obsessed with productivity – it’s quite the buzzword. Google is joining the trend with new ChromeOS features, including quite a few that will lead to greater productivity. Many video-editing features are being added as well.

Also read: 28 Best Chromebook Tips and Tricks for Beginners

New ChromeOS Video-Editing Features

Certainly, the productivity features will be popular, but what Google is pushing in a blog post are new video-editing features for more creativity.

Google Photos will have these new features, along with the movie editor in ChromeOS. You’ll be able to combine video clips, images, music, and even a title card into a new video. You can even give Google a few hints and have it create the movie for you out of your content.

Chromeos New Productivity Features Video Editing
Image source: Google

You can select the parameters for the new movie, such as theme, people, pets, etc., and Google Photos will find photos and pertinent clips from your videos and do all the work for you. But the option is there for you to select your own content too.

On top of creating your own movies, there is also “professional-grade video editing.” The LumaFusion app will be available on Chromebooks with its multitrack video editor that allows you to “add graphics, visual effects, transitions and distortions, audio tracks and sound effects, narration, color grading, and more.”

New ChromeOS Productivity Features

Secondarily, Google is pushing productivity features, both old and new. Surely, this must be a move to compete with the other players in this space.

The blog post first mentions new and old apps – Gallery, Screencast, and Cursive – showing how they can help with productivity, specifically for back-to-school season or working from home.

The Gallery app will now allow you to edit PDFs without installing a third-party app. This will allow you to “fill out forms, highlight text, sign documents, and add text annotations.”

Chromeos New Productivity Features Pdf Editing

Screencast will now allow everyone to “record, view, and share transcribed videos and presentations.” The new cursive app allows Chromebooks with a stylus to “capture, edit, and organize handwritten notes.” Copy and paste to share or save the notes to a PDF.

Some changes within the OS itself will lead to greater productivity. First, there is a newly designed Launcher. It will help you find what you need with just a button push. There’s also Nearby Share and Phone Hub that were added as cross-device features.

Virtual desks will allow you to have groups of windows and apps open at the same time in small collections. You’ll be able to close or open a whole desk at once without being required to close each app and window individually. It will especially work well for students, to have a desk for schoolwork, another for streaming, and another for connecting to friends and family.

Chromeos New Productivity Features Multitasking

Along with light and dark themes, you can personalize your desktop with your Google Photos images as wallpaper and can have the featured photo change daily.

Another option for the home screen is access to your calendar just by tapping the date on your desktop. Notifications are getting an upgrade too. They can be grouped together, and you can respond to them directly from the notification.

Look for these changes to spill out over the next few months. It just so happens that this will coincide with the release of iPadOS 16, which is also upping its game with multitasking features, such as Stage Manager. It seems Google wants ChromeOS to compete with the big dogs in the productivity space, as well as video editing.

Image credit: Unsplash

Subscribe to our newsletter!

Our latest tutorials delivered straight to your inbox

Laura Tucker Avatar
Laura Tucker
Laura has spent more than 20 years writing news, reviews, and op-eds, with the majority of those years as an editor as well. She has exclusively used Apple products for the past 35 years. In addition to writing and editing at MTE, she also runs the site’s sponsored review program.

Read next

In 2016, archaeologists dated two rings of snapped stalagmites in France’s Bruniquel Cave to 176,500 years ago, evidence that Neanderthals had walked 336 metres into darkness with fire and built architecture deep underground long before modern humans reached Europe
Otto von Bismarck was 74 when Germany adopted the world’s first national old-age social insurance program in 1889, setting the pension age at 70 after years of fighting socialists with bans, laws, and a promise few workers would live long enough to use
When cosmonaut Valeri Polyakov stepped out of his Soyuz capsule in March 1995 after 437 consecutive days aboard Mir, doctors recorded him at several centimetres above his pre-flight height, and his spine had become so unaccustomed to gravity that the recovery team carried him to a chair rather than risk the compression of letting him walk.
When Bell Labs engineer Karl Jansky pointed a rotating antenna at the sky in 1932 looking for sources of transatlantic radio static, he kept picking up a faint hiss that peaked every 23 hours and 56 minutes, and he eventually realized he had become the first human to hear the center of the Milky Way.
A contemplative scene with two scientists in a vintage laboratory setting.
When Harvard astronomer Cecilia Payne submitted her 1925 doctoral thesis arguing that the Sun was made almost entirely of hydrogen, the field’s senior figure Henry Norris Russell talked her into adding a line calling the result ‘almost certainly not real,’ and then published the same conclusion himself four years later to widespread acclaim.
When seismic waves from the Chicxulub impact reached what is now North Dakota roughly ten minutes after the asteroid struck, they appear to have triggered a ten-metre standing wave in an inland river that flung fish onto the bank and buried them under glass beads still falling from the sky.
When survivors near Lake Nyos woke on the morning of 22 August 1986, the cattle were dead in the fields, the birds had fallen out of the trees, and 1,746 of their neighbours were lying where they had stood the night before, with no fire, no flood, and no wound to explain it.
In October 2002, a Russian scientist named Dimitri Malashenkov stood up at a space conference in Houston and quietly explained that the dog Laika, whom the Soviet Union had publicly mourned as a heroic week-long orbiter in 1957, had actually died of heat and panic within about five hours of launch.