What is the purpose of your app?

App Notifications is an iPhone App that acts as a client for the Apple Push Notification Service. Use our ready-made Twitter, Gmail and RSS notification services to instantly receive new tweets, search results, emails, RSS feeds or create your own custom notifications with our simple REST API.

You also have a unique e-mail address you can use. Anything you send to this e-mail is notified to you and sent back to your account e-mail without additional latency. You can use it for Nagios alerts, and more.

Current glitches: There is no way for us to guarantee the notifications at this time. The configuration of the application is done through our website, not the application, and might be complex ; an application update will change this. Please do not buy our application if this is a problem for you.

View our support page for more.

Is the latency check real?

The latency check is real and use our API to send you a notification through the Apple servers. It allows you to check if you are currently receiving notifications, and how fast you do receive them.

Bottom line is, if you do not see the latency result, you do not receive any notifications at all. If you do see the result, your notifications are working.

How do I delete all notifications?

Shake the device in the main listing, you'll be able to delete all notifications in a single click.

You can also delete all your notifications through your account page (on a desktop browser).

How do I set the silent mode?

We added a silent mode you can set in your settings page. During silent mode, you'll receive no sounds and no alerts, but the badge number will continue to increment.

You can run the application and still see received notifications.

What sounds are available?

1.caf, 2.caf, 3.caf, 4.caf, 5.caf, 6.caf, 7.caf.

Sound 6 and 7 are not safe for work.

How do I suggest new features?

Please use our support service. We are very interested about feedback and new ideas.

What about privacy?

When you forward your e-mails to your appnotifications address, your e-mails are automatically deleted within few seconds, as soon as your notification was sent. You can delete all notifications shaking your devices, and nothing will be stored on our server anymore. Password are never stored cleartext, neither in the logs neither in the database. They are encrypted using SHA1.

If you have more concerns about this you should use gnupg. You can e-mail us if you need more specific informations.

How can I delete my account?

If you want to delete your account, just visit this page and confirm your request. I suggest you leave a feedback about the reason you want to close your account. We will not keep any informations about you, you will also be able to create a new account whenever you want.

How do I receive notifications for Twitter?

Connect your Twitter account (as many as you want). Your can setup your sound and Twitter client in your general settings.

Your Twitter account may take up to a minute to be processed, you should then start receive push.

Please note than the API we use from Twitter only allows us to push tweets from public profile. Tweets from private profiles will not be pushed to you.

How do I receive notifications for GMail ?

You need to edit your GMail settings and activate Forward a copy of incoming mail to your appnotification e-mail and keep GMail's copy in the inbox. You will receive notifications only if you are included in the To: or Cc: headers, except if you specifically ask for receiving all emails. You won't get notified for every mails from mailing lists. You also have to make sure you activated the MailNotifications plugin.

This forwarding way allows us not to have to store your Google credentials (login and password) to check for new mails. We care about your privacy, and we think you should too. We also do not store anything after we sent your notification.

However this is a very efficient way to have that feature, and your notification should come very fast, within seconds.

The notification will open Safari to the GMail website, we are not able to open the Mail.app application with the current Apple SDK, but we suggested Apple to change this.

Hint: if you send yourself an e-mail from GMail, GMail does not forward it. You need to try from another e-mail address.

How do I receive notifications for Google Voice?

Once you are receiving notifications for GMail, Google Voice SMS will be automatically be opening Safari to the Google Voice homepage.

How do I receive notifications for RSS feeds?

Activate our RSS plugin and add any number of RSS feed, one per line (please add the exact RSS feed URL, not the website URL only). We suggest you do not add too many as you will get notified for every new items for every feeds.

RSS feeds urls must begin with http:// or https:// (do not use feed:// it will not work!).

How do I receive notifications for Facebook?

If you use a GMail address for your Facebook account, and have configured our application to receive push for GMail messages, your notifications coming from Facebook will automatically be starting the Facebook iPhone application instead of GMail.

There is no other ways yet to receive notifications for Facebook. There might be in the future.

I do not receive notifications!

Visit your iPhone general settings and make sure you activated notifications, and activated badge, sound and alert for our app.

Run our application, and check latency. If you do not see a popup within minutes, you have an issue with your network. Try unactivating Wifi as your Wifi might filter required ports. Try restarting your iPhone too.

If you are currently using Wifi, outgoing port 5223 needs to be open on any and all firewalls. If the screen is not on, or the device is not tethered,it will go into a "poll" mode, where it wakes up every 30min or so and checks the server for notifications (Apple informations).

When you run the notifications app, it resets the notifications. All not yet received notifications will be cancelled, on all your devices, as we consider you have read the notifications.

Notifications is not supported on jailbroken iPhones, and even it might work we do not support it. If your iPhone is not jailbroken, and you still do not receive notifications, contact us by e-mail through our support. Give us as many details as possible, including the e-mail address you used to register here.

I do not receive notifications for my e-mails!

By default, we only deliver notifications if your e-mail address (the one you used to register to our service) is specified in the To/Cc e-mail headers.

This is the default behavior, this way you don't get notifications for every e-mail in every list you subscribed. However, if you forward e-mails for multiple accounts, you will have to check this option in the MailNotifications plugins: Check this to receive push notifications for all e-mails, even you are not included in the To/Cc headers.

Future versions will allow you to specific a list of e-mail addresses you use, which you wish to receive notifications for.

How do I send a notification?

CURL example:

$ curl -d user_credentials=YOUR_CREDENTIALS \
	-d "notification[message]=my message" \
	-d "notification[long_message]=Some HTML for the full layout page notification" \
	-d "notification[title]=A notification title" \
	-d "notification[long_message_preview]=the notif preview" \
	-d "notification[message_level]=2" \
	-d "notification[silent]=0" \
	-d "notification[action_loc_key]=Approve me" \
	-d "notification[run_command]=http://maps.google.com/maps?q=cupertino" \
	https://www.appnotifications.com/account/notifications.xml

You can read more on the REST API page (you must be authenticated).

Do you have examples?

You can check our REST API example page for code samples for different languages. Perl developers can check this Perl module developed by Yann Kerhervé.

What charset should I use?

You must use the UTF8 charset when using the API methods.

What applications can I run ?

You can see a list of available applications on this website. Use the protocol in the run_command REST variable, twinkle:// instead of http:// for example.

How do I suggest my users to receive notifications?

You can use the following HTML, replace the RSS feed and the redirect URLs with the one you want.

<form action="https://appnotifications.com/account/authorize" method="post">
        <input id="app_user_connection_app_id" name="app_user_connection[app_id]" value="22" type="hidden" />
        <input id="app_user_connection_rss_feeds" name="app_user_connection[rss_feeds]" value="http://YOURSSFEED.com/FEED.RSS" type="hidden" />
        <input id="success_url" name="success_url" value="http://RETURN_URL/" type="hidden" />
        <input id="cancel_url" name="cancel_url" value="http://RETURN_URL/" type="hidden" />
        <input name="commit" src="http://appnotifications.com/images/appnotifications-icone-nice.png" value="Connect with AppNotification" type="image" />
</form>

Who is the author?

I'm Fabien Penso (my blog, my photography). My previous projects include linuxfr.org in 1998, a French Linux community website ; UUCPssh (now closed), a UUCP over SSH hosting free service, and more which I don't remember.

I started Internet and software development in 1995. These days I do iPhone and Ruby on Rails development, and I'm available for gigs. I also focus most of my time improving this service.

How is this app built?

Serverside is done using Ruby on Rails, we developed our own push notification plugin. The application includes MGTwitterEngine code by Matt Gemmell.