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Even before the global pandemic paralyzed life as we know it, Google was focused on making ChromeOS more productive and versatile. In the past five years, the Chrome operating system has folded in Linux applications and sought to deepen its integration with third-party services. When COVID-19 hit, Google doubled down on ChromeOS and began the evolution that would make Chromebooks the anywhere, anytime laptops for hybrid employees, remote learners, and even gamers.
The one area that most of us were schooled on when the pandemic hit was video calls. We saw the rise of Zoom and the battle for best video chat platform went to an entirely new level. Thankfully for those platforms, there’s plenty of market share to be had.
Johnny Flora once said, “If necessity is the Mother of Invention, than(sic) adversity must surely be the Father of Re-invention.” Oh, how true Johnny. How true. As millions, if not billions, took to the web for daily video calls, these big chat platforms realized that there was a lot of room for improvement and that birthed and entirely new breed of conference software. Most of the major online chat platforms now offer expansive options and capabilities that were practically unheard of from web-based solutions just a few years ago and that’s a very good thing.
Google is right there in the mix and along with major feature additions and improvements to Meet video chat, the company is working to bake this and many other services directly into the DNA of ChromeOS. ChromeOS has added a calendar widget that allows you to easily check your agenda from the shelf of your Chromebook and soon, there will be on demand video conferencing controls in the same locations that will appear any time you open a video chat with a supported platform. Throw in some better integration for Microsoft 365 and perhaps, multi-account switching on the browser level and ChromeOS quickly becomes a perfect solution for an even wider swath of users.
To make things even more convenient for Chromebook users that frequent Google Meet, the ChromeOS team appears to be working on an integrated solution that would add a “Join” button directly to the calendar widget. This new feature was just added to the repository a few days ago and has yet to be merged to the Canary channel. Here’s what we have thus far.
Add “Join” meeting button to calendar events.
This CL adds a "Join" meeting button that will launch Google Meet, if one is linked to the meeting. If there is no Google Meet meeting linked, then the button will not be added to the view hierarchy.
It looks as if this will work very much like it does on Google Calendar for the web and on mobile. If there is a meeting attached to a calendar event, a button will appear that you can click to join the meeting. According to the rest of the commit, the link will default to the Google Meet app if it is installed. If not, it will defer to Chrome to open Meet.
If the Google Meet app is installed, it will launch in that, otherwise it will launch in the browser.
This may seem like an insignificant addition but those that live on the web and are in multiple meetings a day will likely find this to be a very welcome efficiency enhancement. As ChromeOS matures and Google continues to put the most-used tools right at our fingertips, the cumulative amount of time that could be saved is astronomical. I love little tweaks like this and I think that the ChromeOS team is doing a bang up job of making Chromebooks the perfect laptop for the masses. Stay tuned for updates on this new feature as they arrive.
