The long-requested calendar widget just got better
After months of waiting, we saw the Quick View Calendar (a calendar built into the Chrome OS taskbar) come to Chrome OS 97, albeit as an experimental feature. Turning it on and clicking the date on your Chromebook (lower right corner) brought up the calendar for that month. However, the feature seemed disconnected from Google Calendar, with the two unable to sync event data. The Chrome OS team is now ready to make Quick View Calendar even more useful by integrating it with Google Calendar events, as shown in the latest Chrome OS 99 Dev Channel.
The folks at About Chromebooks discovered the change as part of the Chrome OS dev channel release 99.0.4815.0. The improvement allows the quick view calendar to show the number of events you have in a day when you hover over dates and show event titles when clicked. You can try the Calendar Quick View widget on the Stable channel as long as your Chromebook is updated to at least Chrome OS 97 – head over to the Chrome URL bar and paste the following flag chrome://flags#calendar-view and activate it. Next, you will need to restart your device and then click on the date in your status bar to activate the feature.
Once done, you’ll have access to the basic calendar, which blends seamlessly with the rest of the UI, even supporting dark mode. The feature will show a preview of the current date and month, as well as allow you to navigate through previous and future months and back to the present by clicking Today. However, you won’t be able to see your Google Calendar events or view their titles at this time, as the latest addition is not on the Stable channel. To try out the full integration right now, you need to update to the latest version from the Chrome OS Dev channel. Be warned that this can be relatively unstable, so do so at your own risk.
For now, these are all added features, but there is still time for Google to improve the Quick View Calendar integration with Google Calendar. Who knows, we might see additional event details and even the ability to edit events directly from the Chrome OS system tray.
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