[whatwg] Installed Apps

[Tab Atkins Jr.]

On Wed, Jul 29, 2009 at 8:32 AM, Michael
Kozakewich<mkozakewich at icosidodecahedron.com> wrote:
> From: "Michael Davidson" <mpd at google.com>
> Tuesday, July 28, 2009 11:24 PM
>>
>> Having some sort of desktop presence is important for parity
>> with desktop apps. Perhaps the install UI could look and feel more
>> like the UI for installing a native app?
>>
>> Michael
>>
>
> If you're going to have an installation, why not make it an actual program?
> I thought what you wanted was a regular webpage -- and I'd say one of the
> most important things about a webpage is that you don't have to install it.
> It sounds like the "hidden page" idea is just the solution you thought up to
> the problem of keeping a page running. How many other reasons are there for
> it?

Agreed that having an actual persistent entity separate from the
browser is, well, an application separate from the browser.  There's
probably something useful and cool possible here with a browser window
communicating with a separate program.

> That being said:
>
> Pop-up notifications would be a great thing to do, where someone can use
> JavaScript similar to an alert() box that pops up in a corner for a few
> seconds and displays a message. I think I'll call this one out a few times,
> so someone sees it, because it really would be a worthwhile thing to add to
> a spec.

Firefox's Jetpack addon (essentially Greasemonkey turned up to 11)
exposes a super-convenient  jetpack.notifications.show() function for
doing exactly that.  It pops up an attractive notification in the
lower right-hand corner of the screen for a few seconds with a custom
title, text, and icon.  I'd like to have something like this as a
general feature.

~TJ