After refreshing its social network at I/O, Google has decided that cards are the future, and it’s updating its Drive app accordingly. The entire interface of Drive for Android has been reworked in the flat, squared-off style that Google, Facebook, and others have been going for lately, with an increased focus on images. Users can switch between a text-based list and a grid that offers larger file previews, and individual file previews are displayed in a style reminiscent of Google+ cards, with the option to swipe between files and download them locally.
Google refreshes Drive for Android interface, adds option to ‘scan’ paper documents
is a senior tech and policy editor focused on online platforms and free expression. Adi has covered virtual and augmented reality, the history of computing, and more for The Verge since 2011.
Besides interface changes, the biggest new addition to Drive is the “scan” feature. Essentially, Drive will now let users take a picture with their camera and save it in Drive as a PDF, using optical character recognition (OCR) to pick out text in it. The idea is that it can be used for saving receipts or business cards to your phone — a feature we’d love to see added to Google’s somewhat neglected Keep note-taking tool. You can find these new features, along with bug fixes and support for a few more formatting options in spreadsheets, over at the Play Store.
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