Google may be planning to make the Chromecast’s home screen a little more useful. Reddit user asjmcguire overnight uncovered mentions of weather forecast capabilities in the HTML source of the Chromecast’s home screen, suggesting that it could soon show your current local weather forecast and more.
It seems that Google’s looking to add “topics” to the Chromecast’s home screen, one of which is your local weather forecast. The source code below clearly shows reference to a topic named “isRaining”:
The icons below are directly referenced by the source code above, and are assumed to display according to various weather-based topic conditions:
A number of third party developers have been experimenting with adding weather forecasts and other information features for Chromecast ever since Google opened up the Chromecast SDK in February, but these would be individual apps rather than information appearing directly on the home screen.
With the addition of one topic could come many. Google may be experimenting with displaying multiple information topics relevant to the user on the Chromecast home screen. The Chromecast is an Internet-connected device running a browser with HTML and Javascript rendering capabilities, so why not add some relevant information for the user?
There’s also a mention of personal photos. While many of us admire the beautiful images selected for the Chromecast home screen’s background, sometimes it’d be nice to personalise it with our own photo stream so this would be a welcome change.
A Google representative told Gigaom, who sought comment on these developments:
“We’re always experimenting with new features, but have nothing new to announce.”
Perhaps Google is planning to roll out some of these new features at Google I/O 2014. It’s only a couple of months away, after all.
What information would you like to see on your Chromecast home screen? Have you seen any of these changes on your own Chromecast? Let us know in the comments!
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