Your Chromebook’s calendar widget will soon show you which event is coming up next

The awesome, new calendar widget for ChromeOS pops up from the bottom-right of your laptop’s shelf in month view and shows which events you have scheduled for that day over on Google Calendar. At this time, it’s fairly rudimentary, not allowing for event creation locally or anything.

Despite this, it’s quickly gaining features, like the upcoming visually overhauled “Jelly” UI, which applies a bouncy Material You interface to your event list (see below) and a Join button for quickly hopping into Google Meet calls without opening the web interface first.

Now, a new “Up next” pop-up will reveal itself to the user on ChromeOS Canary with the aforementioned Jelly UI telling them, well, which event is “up next”, of course. What’s unique about this is that it provides faster access to the next event in the individual’s schedule, even if the date they’re highlighting on the widget has no events planned.

From what I noticed, the event only appears once after opening the widget or launching ChromeOS from a cold start and then does not show again after that point. It’s clear that it’s meant to be a glanceable toast notification and not an ever-present indicator, as the space it takes up is replaced by the events for any given day the user clicks on in the month view.

My guess is that this “Up next” pop-up will be combined with the “Join” button for Meet calls to both show you which event is up next and let you join all from the same pop-up if it’s a Meet-enabled event. ChromeOS continues to get more beautiful and functional as the years go by. Now, if I could only run Unreal Engine 5 on a ChromeOS desktop, I’d likely switch away from Windows entirely, but I’m not holding my breath!