So far, Gboard has received a Material You redesign that introduced rounded UI elements and support for Dynamic Color. The latest tweak to conform to Material You sees Gboard get circular key popups.
Without the “Popup on keypress” setting turned on, Google will simply highlight the character being tapped, make a sound, or vibrate. If the extra visual confirmation is enabled, the letter gets extended with a rectangular box above it.
For Android 12, the rectangle changes to a circle and better matches the other curved Material You stylings that were recently added. The character being held down no longer disappears, but rather gets hued.
That circular treatment also applies when long-pressing the “comma” key for settings and to enable one-handed mode. The same occurs when holding “period” for more punctuation options. In this rounded panel, move around and note how smooth and fluid the selection animation/indicator — which leverages to Dynamic Color — is.
This Material You popup is widely rolled out with the latest Gboard beta (version 10.9) today. It joins the recent settings redesign of the “Theme” page, but the broader preferences page overhaul to match the Android 12 Settings app is not yet live. Regardless, Google’s keyboard redesign is nearly complete.
More about Gboard:
- Gboard for Wear OS works on the Galaxy Watch 4 w/ Google’s voice-to-text, QWERTY layout
- Gboard getting even more Material You flourishes [Update: Theme settings redesign live]
- Gboard now prominently highlights the most likely word suggestion
- Gboard 10.9 lets you turn off copy/paste highlights for addresses, phone numbers
Dylan Roussel contributed to this article
Author: Abner Li
Source: 9TO5Google
