Chrome: Chime is an extension for Chrome that intercepts your notifications for popular services like Gmail, Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, LinkedIn, and others, then puts them all together into a single drop-down menu in Chrome that you can click to see them at once. Click any one of them to go right to the source of the notification.


We've shared our disdain for notifications before, but if you're like most of us and can't just turn them all off and walk away, you need a way to streamline them. So far, Chime is looking like a great option. Once you've installed Chime, the app will check which of the supported services you're currently logged in to (so you don't have to add them again) and start tracking them for you. In addition to the services we mentioned, Chime also supports Quora, Stackoverflow, Reddit, Github, and FourSquare.

Notifications Are Evil What's your maximum NPH? How many notifications are you exposed to every hour? Let's take a second Read more


Each time you get a new notification, you'll see a desktop alert, color coded so you can tell which service it is at a glance. The alert also includes a short snippet of text to let you know whether it's something you need to look at right away, like the subject line of an incoming email or the text of a Twitter @-reply or a Facebook notification. Clicking the Chime toolbar button shows you those new and unread notifications, but you can always choose to see all notifications across all of your supported services by clicking "All Notifications" to open your notification history. You can keep the Chime in-browser page up to see them as they come in, or close it and let the drop-down button in your toolbar do its work.

Chime is in public beta, but it's already showing a lot of promise. Best of all, the app runs entirely locally, and all of your login and notification information stays right on your computer—it's not sent to the cloud or anything, so you don't have to worry about a web service in between your networks and your computer. You can visit the app's home page to read more about the app or sign up to stay up to date on development. To just get started, hit the Chrome Web Store link below to install it now and give it a try. It works everywhere Chrome does.

Chime | Chrome Web Store