My brother was working on a simple desktop app that needed popup notifications and as we were brainstorming ideas, my fondness for web-apps prompted me to look into the webkit notification API (and try to convince him to make the app into a web-app). I've written up a short tutorial for the webkit notification API below. The API is currently only supported by Google Chrome, but it's pretty cool and hopefully will be adopted by other browsers. Basically it lets you pop-up a small notification (after requesting permission) as an always-on-top window separate from the browser window. It looks like this: and it shows up in the upper right corner on Macs or the lower right corner in Windows. For the impatient, here's a quick demo: (remember, only works in Chrome) Notify me! From this point on, I'm going to make the (terrible) assumption that all of our app's visitors are using Chrome so we don't have to worry about checking browser support or degrading gracefully