An interesting find made by astute French developer François Beaufort indicates Google Chrome will be getting a notification center soon. Beaufort discovered the addition while mulling over the source code for the latest build of Chromium -- the open-source project on which official releases of Chrome are based. Users running the latest build can enable the rudimentary feature by toggling Enable Rich Notifications on under chrome://flags.
Last month, Beaufort discovered code in Chrome which led him to posit that Google Now -- a feature currently found on Android -- are destined to hit the desktop via Chrome. His latest discovery further supports that previous supposition, since the new notification center should pose as "the perfect hub" for Google Now cards. If Beaufort is correct, we may be witnessing the beginnings to a partial convergence of once-unique features found in Android, Chrome and Chrome OS.
Google Now is a feature which ponies up context-relevant notifications. Google describes Google Now as giving its users "just the right information at just the right time".
Such notifications can be triggered by certain conditions, like your location, and include a growing variety of potential notifications, such as conjuring your bus pass while waiting at the bus stop, alerting you of flight delays the day you're scheduled to leave town, providing traffic information while you're on your way to work or even offering up nearby photo spots while passing by a visually interesting location.
While HTML5 notifications have been available in Chrome for some time now, these "rich" notifications appear to be a jazzed-up version of the feature. The upcoming notification center promises a way to maintain a history of such notifications. It may also provide a central area for all Google-related notifications, such as placing HTML5 -- and possibly Google Now notifications -- in a single space for quick review.
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