Desktop Apps with Bubble

I must admit I had never heard of Bubbles before I tried out the time tracking service SlimTimer.

Bubbles is a Windows only ‘browser’ which lets you create site specific ‘bubbles’ to run in the system tray.

It can actually be very useful for any web service you find yourself constantly using, but as of yet has no kind of desktop access. SlimTimer was designed to take advantage of it specifically, but it works pretty well with a lot of other websites as well.

Really it’s just the fact you can minimise these ‘bubbles’ to the system tray which makes it useful for me, if it wasn’t for that then you can get a lot of the functionality through other means.

The problem is a lot of the Bubbles functionality overlaps what other programs I use already do, but that might not be the case for you.

It does have some useful extensions such as notifications for Google services like Google Reader, Gmail and Facebook. You can also drag and drop photos to be uploaded to Flickr, a handy one if this is a service you use.

Personally I don’t know how this is going to compete against technologies such as Adobe AIR and Google Gears and maybe even Mozilla Prism. However the simplicity of Bubbles may be its strong point, and plenty of developer tools and resources are provided on the site. Do any of you use this?

Update: The Bubbles website is no longer available on the Internet.  With the service gone, users are left with using widgets or small notification tools on their desktop. It depends a lot on what you want those services and applications to do. For the more popular services, like Gmail, Twitter or Facebook, you usually get those tools and widgets without issues.

Update: Bubbles is no longer available, and we are not aware of any comparable solution that combines notifications for multiple web services. Sorry guys.

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