Push4 / AppNotifications just got in the top 10 geeky RSS technology application from readwriteweb :
Fabien Penso’s fabulous iPhone push notification app released a 3.0 version this year, but it’s just the nice clean basics that make this one a winner. Input any feed, or many other sources of information, and Penso’s app will push it to your phone in real time. It works really, really well and is better than ever with the introduction of the Apple Notification Center in iOS5. A double digit percentage of the stories I reported on this year came from feeds I consumed in this app.
Thank you ReadWriteWeb!
You recently had issues with Twitter, as our connection to the sitestreams API (real time) wasn’t working. I was using a beta url for it, which recently stopped working. I also had a user having 4000 pushes per hour, which generated a slowness issue.
A few hours work fixed it, and your tweet should now be pretty instant, I expect them as instant as the official Twitter app, maybe more.
I also had a problem with Apache dying last night, which meant you could not view notifications anymore, neither login. I restarted it and it seems fine, and I’ll find a way to automatically restart it soon.
Yesterday I found out our slave was not responding, I’ve rebooted it remotely but it went out of sync generating issues like new data being inserted in the DB (so receiving notifications) but not being able to be read (like opening the app would not show the data).
Problem is I’m currently in India, on a Edge connection through a USB Vodafone key, and yesterday just when needing it, this thing wasn’t !$% working !
Getting 30 seconds of connection, I’ve removed the slave from my configuration so all went smooth again, except for emails. Forgot postfix was using the slave, and you guys had no email notifications since. I’ve now fixed email notifications but MTAs are currently sending loads of emails to my server so it might take a few hours (including the backlog you will receive). I will fix this for next time having postfix looking for both DB.
I still need to resync the slave and put it back.
This is the down part of having an application requiring a server, the day the servers go offline, the app won’t work anymore. There is sadly no way for me to go around that, and I’m actually the only developer doing all the work on the iPhone part, and on the server part. I’m 100% committed to add features (some good stuff coming in later release) but even having lots of users, it doesn’t pay for a the amount of work I’ve put in this project so far.
Oh but I don’t care if it doesn’t pay, I enjoy doing it.
I’ve added Foursquare pushes for your friends, only around a specific radius. I was tired to receive notifications for people checkin in on the other side of my city, I only wanted checkins for people around me (less than a kilometer). See this gist, and my Foursquare Hackathon submission, I would appreciate you voting for me once open.
Push Notifications for your friends only within a specific radius ?
1. Install http://2apn.com or http://2apn.com/lite on your iPhone, run the app
2. Visit http://4push.com/account/foursquare and connect your foursquare account, select the desired radius.
3. Done
Note: Step 2 will be embedded in the iPhone app in the next update.
I’ve never really be happy with the way you could create application to deliver push to other users, it lacked documentation of course but most of all, the authorization scheme was non standard (you had to use an api_key and pass_key, you would get a remote_id to tell which user you wanted to deliver to, etc). This is now history, you now have oauth to deliver Apple push notifications, and the developer website has been updated accordingly. Authenticating as a user to deliver push notification is now super simple : see this gist. To my knowledge, this is the first time OAuth allows you to deliver Apple Push Notification, and I’m happy to be the first.
It means anyone can deliver push notifications to any of my users. However you might not want to tell your users to buy my application, so you now have Push Lite, a free version of my popular application, full featured but including advertisements.
The main website has also been updated, thanks to Twitter Bootstrap, and I will add more features to it soon.
Today a user added a twitter keyword (iPhone) generating 700,000 pushes within a super short amount of time (a few hours?), which went fine. The bad idea was when I tried to delete those to help him running his device. The load on the server just blew up, and the company hosting us being in Paris, I had to wait they wake up to get a hard reboot.
To prevent this, and as of now :
- Twitter keyword are being looked at, if too popular it will be automatically unactivated for you (we warn you with a push).
- If you receive too many pushes within one hour, you will receive an email and won’t get any anymore for one hour, so you don’t generate 700,000 pushes.
- Push tables are sharded and will soon be deployed in production, to prevent a user slowing others
- Another server will be deployed within a week, and should prevent what happened today. Those server are the fastest our host can get, with at least 16Gigs of memory each.
Sorry about this outage, I know for some of you the application is super important and I’m doing my best for reducing issues.
I always wanted to be able to subscribe to RSS feeds from my browser, while I was reading blogs. This is now possible, just drag&drop PushRSS in your toolbar, and click while reading a website you want to subscribe to. It’s easier if you have unlimited access so you don’t have to run the application to activate the feed.
Well in the end our twitter account @appnotification is updated more often than this blog. We worked really hard for this release and hope you like it, it’s available at 2apn.com (within 24 hours) and the list of new features looks like :
- Retina display icons
- You can share RSS feeds over email and Twitter
- Instapaper / ReaditLater support
- Can define the number of notification on the frontscreen
- Can define a unread number in the alerts in the settings
- Can reply to twitter public mentions within the application
- Can reply to twitter direct messages within the application
- Can receive email settings informations by email
- Can receive API token by email
- More iPad specific UI (for modal windows)
- Silent hours can now be setup from iPads
- Twitter now uses XAUTH
- Settings have been simplified and redesigned a bit
- Login screen has been designed for iPhone and iPad
- You can now shake in main screen for deleting all notifications
- Popup within notification has been redesigned
- Can specify to include unread number of items within the push alert
- New Twitter and New notification screen have been redesigned
- Add RSS feeds from specific URL
Of course it also includes bugfixes. Let us know how you like it. Try the new sharing feature, it’s really nice.
Version 2.0 has just been approved on the appstore and should take 24 hours to be online, it will be available on 2apn.com, and you can read this previous post about the little pricing change. The bottom line is you get unlimited access if you unlocked version 1 of the application, which is worth more the value.
Help us improving the application, post feedback here or/and to our Twitter account @appnotification, or to our tenderapp powered support site http://help.appnotifications.com/
I’ve worked really hard on this one, so I’m super excited to get your feedback on it!
Our new version has been submitted to Apple.
The bad news is: Yes, it will be a new paid application (for $0.99 at first), it includes any service you’ll want to activate. The new pricing scheme for this version is unlock per feature, for the lowest fee possible on the AppStore.
The good news is: If you bought the previous application and unlocked it, you’ll have access to an unlimited number of services. This unlimited access is also included in v2, but will be more expensive than the current v1 unlocking. Previous v1 will still be supported if you don’t want to upgrade.
Now you wonder how v2 look ? Check these videos for RSS settings, Twitter settings, and browsing within the application. Coming next to you soon.
