One of the nicer refinements in Android Oreo is the inclusion of Notification Dots which sit on an apps icon to advise when there’s an action for you to look at, and Google seems to be about to bring them to Chrome OS.
The inclusion of Notification Dots in Chrome OS code was found by Chrome Story who noticed a commit which lists ‘cros: Add Notification indicators for shelf app icons’ – or more commonly known as Notification Dots. This conclusion is cemented by the comment which lists the description of the feature implementation as ‘Draws an indicator in the top right corner of the image to represent an active notification.’
One interesting inclusion found in the files attached to the commit is a code comment which says ‘// Enables the touchable app context menus;’, so perhaps Google is looking to bring notification previews, which let you long press on an icon with a notification dot to preview the notification to Chrome OS too.
The commit is based on a bug which is unfortunately private, but the commit itself has a fair amount of comments on it all added in the past week, indicating it’s being actively developed. The folks at Chrome Story believe this new feature would be for both Chrome apps and for Android apps running on Chrome OS.
It’s an interesting development, but one we’ll have to wait a little longer to check out. Stay tuned.
