Lately, the tech world has been talking a lot about Chrome OS. There’s been a new HP Chromebook announced, and earlier today we saw a video for a touch screen 2560×1700 resolution Chromebook. In the latest developer build of Chrome OS there is a new feature called Notifications, which is on the bottom right side next to the time and your account picture. There is also another app coming soon called Message Center. This first showed up when developer Fran§ois Beaufort shared it on Google+.
Now, JR Raphael from Computer World has had a chance to play with the system using an internal demo app for Chrome OS. Which is the same app that Fran§ois Beaufort showed off in his screenshots last week.
So what is Message Center? Technically we don’t know yet, but it looks like a place for all your messages to appear in one place. Currently the app is only built for Gmail notifications. Soon we could see Google Voice, Google Talk, and possibly Google Now get added to this Message Center.
As you can see in the image above, the message center appears in the lower right corner next to the status bar. Now when a new notification appears, it’ll show up for about about 10 seconds then go into the Message Center. Which when you click on it, all your notifications will be displayed in a card-like stack. In addition, each notification shows a thumbnail image along with a headline and short snippet of text. In the image below, you can see how the Gmail notifications look. Pretty similar to Gmail notifications in Android 4.1 and above, right?
So that’s message center. It looks like there is still some work that needs to be done, but it looks great and is a great addition to Chrome OS. It’ll also be interesting to see which third-party developers can integrate their Chrome apps with the new Message Center. I’d love to see Tweetdeck work with it. Has anyone else tried Message Center yet? Let us know in the comments below.
To Install the Message Center app do the following:
- Enable the “Experimental Extension APIs” in Chrome://flags
- Download the zipped app
- Unzip it
- Go to chrome://extensions
- Check “Developer Mode”
- Select the extracted folder
- Launch the app.
Now you just have to be prepared to be amazed! Hopefully we’ll have more development with Message center real soon.