Chrome Canvas, a progressive web app that Google released last week without any fanfare lets you make quick doodles, which you can automatically save to your Google account. You can also save the masterpiece to your own computer.
Type ‘canvas.apps.chrome’ into a Chrome browser on any computer, and pull up a basic drawing app without having to download any programs or apps. Chrome Canvas first showed up as an app in a recent Chrome OS Dev build, but it is available now on any browser that supports WebAssembly, like Firefox.
The app’s features are pretty rudimentary, with a basic toolbar consisting of a color palette, pencil, pen, marker, chalk, and eraser tools. You can export your drawing as a PNG file when you have finished, or pull up the same drawing on your phone, and vice versa from your Google account.
To install the app on your Chromebook, just tap the three-dot button and hit ‘install Canvas’, and it’ll show up as a palette icon on the Chrome OS launcher. It will also prompt you to add Chrome Canvas if you access the site from your Android phone.
Meanwhile, Google claimed in a recent blog post that its AI-powered camera tool, Google Lens, now has the capability to recognize over a billion items. Google Lens launched last year in a preliminary version on Photos and Assistant with only around 250,000 items within its repertoire.
The expansion comes over a year after the Google Lens’ optical character recognition engine has been trained on reading more product labels. By recognizing text, Google Lens thus can put names to the faces of more goods. It has also been fed more data from photos taken by smartphones, so Google says the feature is overall more reliable than before.
The one billion figure comes from products available through Google Shopping, so it likely will not include more obscure items. Nevertheless, it covers a huge range of things that could appease someone who is just looking up an item they are curious about.
Beyond shopping items, Google Lens can now also recognize people, Wi-Fi network names, and geometric shapes, in addition to the litany of categories it could already analyze. The ability to automatically connect to Wi-Fi by snapping a photo of a router label was introduced at I/O 2017, and this year added the ability to copy information from a business card and add it to your phone’s contact list.