Gmail gets desktop notifications (if you're a Chrome user) | Hacker News Reader

Gmail gets desktop notifications (if you're a Chrome user)

thenextweb.com

15 pointsbradmccarty10 comments

Just noticed this update to gmail a few minutes ago. Looks like it's a webkit feature though, and only chrome specific for the time being.

Check some example code here: http://www.210computing.com/google/chrome_notifications.html

And the draft API here: http://www.chromium.org/developers/design-documents/desktop-...

Noticed that, as well. Interesting that the blog post from Google says that they are trying to make this a feature of the "standard Web platform."

http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2011/01/desktop-notifications-...

The last.fm music player chrome extension uses this to pop up track names when they start playing: http://chrome-music.tumblr.com/

Interesting timing. tdfx just asked for this 8 hours ago. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2143881

What powerful influence!

They should have gone for growl integration on OS X, that's why I disabled it.

Growl would have been infinitely better in that I can then set up what the notifications look like, how long they linger on my screen and the font size and whatnot.

Not sure why didn't go with Growl instead of rolling their own...

Growl is great for all the reasons you state, but Chrome doesn't use it because Growl doesn't allow HTML, and it would require us to ship Chrome with Growl for all the users who don't have it.

HTML notifications can be powerful because they allow you to include live content (video of the person attempting to video chat with you) and actions (e.g. archive, reply buttons) if you choose.

It's not inconceivable that someone could write something that suppressed and stripped the text out of a Chrome notification and presented it in a Growl notification.

Does this work on Linux?

I haven't seen it on Gmail and Chrome 10.0.642.2 dev yet, but the underlying webkit does work on Ubuntu et al.