Over the last few months, the Chrome OS notification center was ported to Chromium and then to Chrome Canary, but the feature was limited to just Windows. Now it looks like the first attempts to do the same for OS X, at least in Chromium, have surfaced, paving the way for Google Now to arrive on Apple’s desktop platform.
I’ve been playing around with Google Now since I picked up my Nexus 7 and found it to be interesting but not essential. My primary use case, which I now do nearly every day, is checking it when commuting to and from the office to see if traffic is heavy on my primary route. I use to use Waze to do that, but Now provides the same information with less effort (although Waze assuming you were commuting at certain times of the day was very helpful).
I still think there’s some way to go with Now though. Some of the information it surfaces isn’t particularly relevant (it seems to put a very heavy emphasis on sports results, yet doesn’t let me follow Rugby) and on my Nexus it repeatedly recommends I visit the Hilton hotel down the road from my house as a point of interest. I’m not going to, in case you’re wondering.
I also think that Google Now will be held back by the limitations of carriers. In the UK I have unlimited 3G access, but when I travel abroad, when I could really use Now, I’ll get charged £6 per MB. That means I’m almost certainly not going to use it.