Google on Friday announced a new feature for its Drive service: a significantly revamped Create menu featuring third-party apps. For consumers, the change means Drive-connected apps are easier to access while for developers, their work is now more visible to potential users.
Here’s how it looks:
It’s a small change but a significant one if you dig a bit deeper. As you can see, and as Google explains, the menu means that the few hundred Drive-connected apps that exist are now on the same level as official Google apps (documents, presentations, spreadsheets, forms, and drawings on the left, everything else on the right).
Not only is there more space in the Create menu for your apps, but users can add them with the handy “Connect more apps” link at the bottom. This opens up a new “Connect apps to Drive” dialog, which Drive users can browse to connect Drive-enabled apps.
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It looks similar to the Chrome Web Store; there are a few apps listed, a filter by category option, and of course a search box:
The reason for the Chrome Web Store similarity is simple: the service is leveraging it; that’s exactly where Drive apps are listed. Developers that have their work in the store don’t have to do anything new to take advantage of this change as Google will automatically pull all the information from existing listings.
What’s interesting here is that Google Apps users got an updated Drive menu just two days ago. That one shows the menu as more narrow and minimal, but this is simply because no apps had been added at the time:
Furthermore, Google actually cut out a feature: “To create a new file from a template, open the appropriate editor (Docs, Sheets or Slides) and click on File > New > From template. This functionality has been removed from the new ‘Create’ menu.”
It’s only a matter of time before we see how quickly Google Drive users start adding apps thanks to this tweak.
See also – Google updates Drive for iOS with multiple photo/video uploading, QuickOffice integration, and more and Google Drive now lets developers share hosted websites by storing HTML, JavaScript, and CSS files
Image credit: Pawel Kryj
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