Google’s keynote presentation for its second day of Google I/O has been focusing mostly on mobile. Google sees mobile connectivity as a “revolution” that will bring the unconnected parts of the of the world online.
As part of its mobile focus, Google has announced that Google Drive is coming to both iOS and Chrome OS. Clay Bavor, director of product management for Google Apps, took the stage during the keynote presentation to show off some of the Google Drive features that have made it into iOS and Chrome OS.
To demonstrate the iOS version of Drive, Bavor logged into the app on an iPad and demonstrated Drive’s ability to use optical scan technology in its searches. Using image recognition technology, Drive was able to search through a list of unlabeled PDFs and find the search term Bavor used. The technology is also able to recognize the content of photos, and Bavor was able to find a specific unlabeled, untagged vacation picture in his Drive using the word “pyramid.”
Bavor then briefly demonstrated Google Drive for Chrome OS, showing how easily another person or persons can be added to collaborate and edit a single document “in the cloud.” He then announced a feature Google Drive users have been requesting for quite a while: offline editing.
As of today, Google Drive now supports offline editing with seamless transitioning. Changes made to a document while in offline mode are saved to a local cache, then quickly synced the next time an internet connection is established.
Bavor also briefly demonstrated how third party applications are integrated into Drive. He used HelloFax and Lucidchart as quick examples of how the feature works on a Chromebook.
All of these features will be supported through the Drive SDK version 2, which launches today. The Google Drive app for iOS and Chrome OS will be available later today.