On Mac, Growl has a WebKit backend. I want web content in notification popups (or toasts, or bubbles, or whatever you want to call them) on Windows. Chrome as a Prism-killer would be a lot more compelling if webapps could sit in the system tray and be able to notify the user via fully interactive nicely skinned (glass, transparency, etc) JS/CSS toasts.
From contributing bits and pieces to wxWebKit I know my way around WebKit, and I know it has the ability to render transparent pages (see the mac Dashboard). What I'm not sure about is how such an idea would be implemented in Chrome's architecture.
My initial thought was that a slim process would sit in the tray and use chrome.dll to do the rendering. I realize Chrome already has complex notions about multiprocess rendering, so I don't quite know how such a scheme would work--would growl-win.exe spawn a chrome.exe just like the real browser, or is chrome.dll usable from a single process?
Anyways I just wanted to see if anyone have any thoughts on this, either in general or specifically areas in the source I should check out before I go start prototyping. Is this something that should wait for the incoming extensions API? From reading http://dev.chromium.org/developers/design-documents/extensions/process-model it sounds like what I want--an always resident process that other apps (in addition to any webpages) can use--might not fall exactly into the ideas going into the extension API. Thanks for any input!