Glimpse lets you check your favorite webpages from Notification Center

Glimpse extension

Glimpse is a new app that lets you pin one or more favorite webpages to the Today tab of Notification Center, allowing to have a quick glance at your most visited websites, without having to launch Safari. The Notification Center extension is particularly handy to check news-focused websites where information is often time sensitive, and where a quick look is usually enough to get an idea of what is going on, without necessarily unlocking the device and opening up the full web browser.

To set a webpage, simply launch the app, type in the name and URL of the specific webpage you want to add, and drag the little knob to select the size of the widget area. Save the changes, and you’re done. Alternatively, you can easily add any webpage to Glimpse from the Safari extension. The app allows you to add more than one webpage to the Today tab.

Once you’ve set up the webpages you want to keep an eye on, pull down Notification Center and you will be presented with a thumbnail of one of the pages you’re tracking. If you have set up several webpages, you can navigate through all of them with directional arrows.

Tapping on a webpage in Glimpse will not take you directly to the site. Instead, you will have the option to either manually refresh the webpage’s thumbnail, or you will be able to open it in Safari.

Speaking of refreshing, it’s important to note that Glimpse doesn’t provide a live view of the site, but rather a screenshot of it at a given time. By default, the extension is set to refresh the site’s thumbnail every 30 minutes while on Wi-Fi, and every 4 hours while connected to the web via cellular. This refresh rate can be tweaked to the user’s liking.

At $2.99, the app isn’t cheap per say, but it does provide a unique feature that will certainly appeal to many.

You can download Glimpse in the App Store for $2.99.