Chrome OS has grown over the years in many ways, but the past 24 months of development have seen most UI changes happen in the tablet side of things. We’ve talked about the tablet mode of Chrome OS a lot over that time and it looks like we’re finally to the place where small tweaks and updates become the norm instead of seeing massive overhauls to the way things are done from a touch perspective.
This latest change is fully fleshed out in the Canary Channel of Chrome OS 85 and is also available in the Developer Channel as well. We chose to highlight the Canary Channel as the feature seems to be a bit more visually cleaned up here for the time being. All that said, what we’re seeing in the app launcher isn’t a radical change, but it is a tweak that should go a long way towards making your launcher far easier to organize and edit.
On your Chromebook right now, when you go to move an app from one page of apps to another, you are left guessing a bit on how far to drag the icon before the next page jumps into view. It isn’t intuitive and feels a tad clunky in practice. With this new feature (still hidden behind the flag chrome://flags/#enable-launcher-app-paging), users will have a clear visual representation of what is happening when you long press an app in the launcher and attempt to move it from one page to the next. The effect is reminiscent of home screen animations on Android, giving things a slight outline per page along with a subtle zoom-out effect. The combination of the two make it far easier to move apps between pages and know exactly where you need to drag the app to move on to a different page.
Additionally, this works the exact same way on the desktop with a mouse. The animations are there, the zoom-in-and-out effect is present, and the whole process makes a ton more sense and feels far more intuitive than it did prior. Again, this is a small tweak, not a big overhaul, but I think the impact will be very large for many new users who aren’t as familiar with the OS as some of us who’ve been around a while. These small changes and upgrades are what will take Chrome OS to the next level as growth continues to balloon in the new Work From Home reality we all suddenly find ourselves in. I’m looking forward to many new features like this in the near future as Chrome OS updates continue to arrive in 2020.
SOURCE: Chrome OS Reddit – Kent Duke
