picoBeat users who browser with Google Chrome rejoice: a Chrome Extension has been released to give you faster access to your agenda, tasks, notes and contacts. The extension will also display desktop notification for birthdays, due tasks and events (provided they have an alarm set). To install, just head over to picoBeat’s Extension page.

The extension builds on the highly portable code used for the Windows 7 desktop gadget. Minimal refactoring was done to accommodate for Chrome architecture, most notably the fact that it runs background code and the GUI widget in separate pages and processes. As both share the same codebase, they’ll both benefit from the same updates and fixes.

The Windows Gadget for picoBeat has been upgraded to version 1.1: it now comes with an extra Notes tab, giving you a speedy access to your existing notes as well as letting you create new ones.

If you are upgrading the gadget do not forget to first uninstall the previous version before installing the new one.

picoBeat itself has been optimized to handle large notes more gracefully by using lazy-loading, this should make handling a large amount of big notes much faster.

The Windows Gadget has been updated and is now in version 1.0. Noticeable improvements include:

• A completely redesigned UI, that is both larger, cleaner and easier to read.
• A new “Tasks” tab that gives direct access to your main to-do list.
• Cleaner, more portable code under the hood.

If you have Windows 7 you can download the new gadget right now.

A small update to the Windows’ desktop gadget has been released : version 0.91 fixes a few issues and brings better ergonomics.

As a sidenote it is now possible to create short notes from the natural language input bar (and hence also from the one inside the Windows gadget) by using the prefix “note:” (i.e.: “note:this is a new note”).