I’m unsure when this new Chromebook calendar feature arrived, but I love it

Right off the bat, here, let me make this 100% clear: this new-to-me feature may have been around for a little while. I’ll explain why I’m just seeing it today in a moment, but we posted about ChromeOS’ Up Next pop-up in the Canary Channel of ChromeOS back in February of 2023, so it’s been around for a bit for sure. When it made the jump to the Stable Channel isn’t immediately clear, but let me explain why I missed this one and why it’s such a nifty feature.

I really need multi-calendar support

I check for the arrival of multi-calendar support in the ChromeOS calendar on a fairly regular basis. It’s being worked on, the flags are there, but up to this point, there’s nothing live on that front just yet. When it does finally arrive, I’ll use that pop-up calendar like no one’s business; but for now, it simply helps me check the date and day.

As I’ve previously explained, I don’t put much on my personal calendar. My wife is our family’s organizer, and I simply mooch off her calendar that is shared with mine. On my phone or on the web, when I look at my shockingly-full calendar, I see all the things she’s added and know what we have going on. I have things on my work calendar, too, but I keep that in a separate place away from my personal schedule.

So the current ChromeOS calendar area in the shelf won’t show me much (or barely anything) since it only displays my personal, single Google calendar that goes generally unused. Seriously, there’s nothing there, so I’m very much looking forward to being able to enable other calendars in that view in the near future.

Up Next pop-up

In testing some things on a different device logged into a different account this morning, however, I was seeing if the multi-calendar flag was working in Canary. At first, I thought it might be functioning since there were actually dots on dates for the first time ever, but I quickly realized I was logged into our over-arching Chrome Unboxed account. No dice on the multi-calendar flag, but upon clicking into the calendar widget, I noticed a pop-up that I’ve not seen prior in Stable.

This new Up Next pop-up is really awesome, and though that single calendar event on my personal calendar is clearly made up, I can see some real usefulness in this sort of glanceable info once I do get those merged calendars down the road.

Again, I’m not sure when this feature trickled down to the Stable Channel, but little additions like this are flat-out awesome in my mind. It looks great, it animates in well, and it adds real utility to a spot on your Chromebook that you likely access a lot. For those of you like me that need those additional calendars to be added to this portion of the OS, you may be in for the same surprise the first time you actually put something on your personal calendar: and hopefully, again when the ChromeOS team adds multi-calendar support in the near future.