First Look: Chromebook Diagnostic App Input Devices and menu tabs

About a week and a half ago, we covered some new updates that would soon be added to the Chrome OS Diagnostic App. If you aren’t familiar with the Diagnostic App, it is the tool rolled out in Chrome OS 90 that gives you insight into the performance of your device’s CPU, memory, and battery health. We have been tracking a bevy of updates to the Diagnostic App including integrated Connectivity Tools and more recently, the Diagnostic App added support for listing connected input devices and a new navigation menu.

The Canary Channel has received numerous updates over the past week and we’re still digging into what’s new. In the mix, it appears that the flags for Input Devices and the Nav Menu are actually working now and we have an early look at the implementation. The new features are partially working, albeit roughly but you can see the additions in the video below.

In the Stable Channel, the Diagnostic app is relatively simplistic but it appears that Google is working to make this an all-in-one troubleshooting tool. The Connectivity tools are still disabled by default as are the aforementioned tools above. Once enabled, you can see that the Diagnostic App reports the current input devices available for the Chromebook. I’m not sure how far-reaching the Input Device card will be but plugging in an external webcam did not update the input information. However, when I plugged in my Logitech Unified Receiver, the Diagnostic App updated and correctly reported all three peripherals that I have paired to the dongle. As it evolves, we will continue to test more accessories to see which types of devices could be reported by the Input card.

The menu is very basic at the moment with very little styling. Based on commits I have found, the Diagnostic App should eventually look very similar to the Chrome OS settings menu with the tabbed menu on the left and the familiar material design styling. Clicking on a menu tab will open the selected section and scroll you to that particular place in the Diagnostic App. The too is still a work in progress, for sure but I suspect that the Diagnostic App will undergo numerous evolutions before Google is happy with it. Stay tuned for updates.