Google Details Chrome’s Background Feature: Run Web Apps Without Seeing Them

Google has been on a mission lately to outline some of the cooler, newer features coming to Chrome on their Chromium Blog. Today brings one of the biggest yet: Background Apps.

This feature has existed on various builds of Chrome/Chromium for some time now. But Google hasn’t been touting it, and it wasn’t really clear how it would be used and/or useful. Well today, it’s very clear. And again, very cool. Essentially, Chrome-based web apps are going to be able to be always open, but hidden in the background.

Why would anyone want to use a web app without seeing it? A couple reasons. First, this allows the browser to notify you in realtime of certain updates, like chat requests or new messages. Second, this may allow the browser to pre-render any page so when you do open it, it will load instantly.

Obviously, the trade-off is the memory hit you take by running an app in the background, but presumably these could be coded to have a minimal impact in terms of memory usage.

Essentially, this gives web apps a “push” notification functionality like Apple uses for the iPhone and iPad. It’s a bit different since that system uses Apple own servers to ping your phone and doesn’t require an app to be open at all, but the effect is the same. A user wouldn’t realize the app is open, but would still get alerts about it.

Of course, there’s a security risk there. But Google addresses that in this way:

To protect our users’ privacy, we’ve made this functionality available only to apps and extensions; regular websites will not be able to open background windows. Developers will also need to declare the “background” capability on their apps.

That’s important beyond the security issue. It could make installing web apps actually useful. Up until now, most of the apps in the Chrome Web Store are similar to the ones that already exist on the web. But with this system, you’d have to “install” an app to get this system working.

Update: And here’s an example app Google has made to show how this will work. This book, when installed, will periodically update in the background.

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Twitter For Mac’s Spectacular Hidden Little Feature: Tweet Anything From Anywhere

I love Twitter for Mac. Love it. It has completely altered my day-to-day workflow. And it has changed the way I use Twitter itself. And that was before I found out about this killer little hidden feature today: Tweet from anywhere.

I don’t know how I missed it before, but apparently installing Twitter for Mac adds a new “Tweet” command to basically a ton of apps running in OS X. MacStories first pointed this out earlier today, and now I can’t get enough.

For example, if you’re browsing the web in Safari or Chrome, highlight a word or passage and right-click. At the bottom of the drop-down, you’ll see the “Tweet” command. Hitting it will populate a tweet for you with the highlighted section. And it works in TextEdit, iChat, Calendar, Mail, etc. If you read it, you can tweet it.

One thing I wish it did in web browser was automatically add a link as well as the text you’re highlights, but baby-steps. I have a feeling that will come.

And yes, plenty of plug-ins have had this ability for a while, but now it’s system-wide. It’s as if Twitter is now baked into OS X.

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