Summary

Notifications is one of the areas where a native application has a significant advantage compared to a web application, especially on Windows. Web applications and browsers provide some limited support for notifications, but it's only thanks to the rich Windows ecosystem that you can enable all the features we have seen in this chapter—images, interactions, progress bars, reminders. Thanks to these features, we can build more engaging applications, which can interact with the user even when they aren't actively using them.

However, be careful when you decide to implement them. Notifications can quickly turn from the most useful feature provided by an application to the most annoying one if they are abused. Don't use notifications for advertising or for delivering information that isn't critical or time sensitive.

In the next chapter, we're going to learn another exciting opportunity that the Windows ecosystem provides for our application...