Apple certainly took their time to activate push notification for the iPhone, but the truth is that it has been worth the wait. As one of the most requested features, it proves to be very useful when used appropriately and with measure.
Boxcar takes advantage of this feature by providing an entry point for all your notifications: Twitter, Facebook, email and even RSS or Growl, and then firing the appropriate app to handle them. This review will take a look at how the app works, and explain where to start.
Setting Up the Service
Boxcar needs you to set up an account with them so they can keep track of your settings and services. It comes in pretty handy too if you have to re-install the application or are using more than one device. The process is really straight forward:
The Set Up Process
Boxcar will eventually (it didn’t a couple of times during the tests) ask you to turn on Push Notifications on your iPhone. This is both a global and per-application setting, so make sure you have everything ready to receive them:
Notification Settings
Each service has its own invidual settings, configurable within Boxcar.
Adding Services
Boxcar comes with free push notifications for one of the available services, whichever one you prefer: Twitter, Twitter search, Twitter trends, an email account, Facebook, an RSS feed or even Growl notifications.
Additional services come at a one-off fee of €0.79 which is paid through an “in-app purchase”. Let’s see how to get up and running with the first service:
Notice
We’ve gone with a popular option that many of you are likely to choose – Twitter:
Twitter Setup
As you can see, the process is fairly simple: select the service, authorize and configure. Kudos to the Boxcar crew for authorizing directly with Twitter instead of storing our username and password.
Adding a payed service is almost just as easy. Here we set up Facebook which, once authorized through Facebook Connect, offers a purchase option:
In App Purchase
Don’t be afraid to experiment with setting up different services, since no real purchase is done until you save settings and enter your AppStore credentials.
How it Works
Boxcar acts as a global entry point for push notifications; once an account has been set up you can choose which other app on your iPhone should handle each notification. In the example above, we set up a Twitter account which sure is able to handle the opening of direct messages:
Push Notification
We have set up Tweetie to handle Twitter notifications, so once we click on the “View” button, Boxcar will open to immediately close and open Tweetie. It’s slightly “hacky”, but a small price to pay for the functionality on offer.
Fine Tuning
Notice the available options for Twitter: you can select from a wide range of notification events and settings, including the sound made, and the option for displaying the number of unread notifications in the app’s icon.
Settings
The “Private Alerts” setting will display a generic message like “You have one mention” instead of the actual message.
Quiet Time
A very interesting global setting is “Quiet Time”. This allows you to select a range of hours during which no sounds are made or messages shown, only updating the application icon. Particularly useful for during the night!
Quiet Time
Go Wild
Now, the real interesting possibilities come with Growl and RSS notifications. Imagine being notified when a download is completed at home, or using a Basecamp RSS feed to be notified when clients leave a message. Why not get exceptionally creative and build an Arduino gadget that notifies you via Twitter, RSS or Growl when the laundry is done! Possible not all that exhilarating, but you get my drift!
Conclusion
All in all, Boxcar is a wonderful service that pushes the limits of what is achievable through iPhone Push Notifications bearing in mind the platform’s own limitations. It’s a pity that when launching an external application it doesn’t automatically show the right tab or sections (such as the DMs tab on Tweetie), but this would require a far more advanced setup.
Other than that, Boxcar offers a truly useful, deeply customizable and flexible set-and-forget solution for push notifications. It’s certainly worth trying out, and is completely free to get started with.
Our Sponsors
Responses
Add YoursTrackbacks
Apple certainly took their time to activate push notification for the iPhone, but the truth is that it has been worth the wait. ...
Apple certainly took their time to activate push notification for the iPhone, but the truth is that it has been worth the wait. ...
Prowl can do the same thing, plus give you text notifications in it’s own interface. Apart from that, there’s a great API to make web services and other software pieces send you notifications when something happens. – The only thing prowl lacks is a good design, which Boxcar has
I’ve fiddled around with Boxcar for a while, but now I am using TwitBird Premium as my main client and that’s not supported.
For a while, I found it very convenient to be instantly notified when a new Tweet came in, but after a while it becomes way too distracting. It might be better if you could set a time period between refreshs, say 30 minutes or 1 hour, so you won’t get bombarded with notifications all the time (especially annoying if you are just in a call or on Skype on the iPhone).
The whole thing might be ok while traveling when there’s nothing to be distracted from, but for the time being I enjoy actually turning off Twitter and RSS for a while to be able to concentrate
I don’t see any reason to have push notifications turned on for anything but @replies and DMs… so unless you’re a celebrity or someone that gets TONS of messages it shouldn’t be THAT distracting.
Good point actually, haven’t considered that before. Thanks!
I’m experiencing an odd behaviour when using push notifications. If I’m in a non-3G area (EDGE), I can’t receive call, the iPhone simply doesn’t ring at all. But if I turn the push off, I can receive calls again.
Is it normal that the iPhone doesn’t allow push + calls without 3G ?
This could have something to do with the fact that you can’t use data and calls at the same time on EDGE. It must be sending/receiving data at the same time that you’re getting the call.
I have been using Boxcar quite a while and I am very happy with it.
BUT where do I find the Quiet Times Options? I just looked through all my settings within the app but I am unable to locate it it?!
Same thing, I cant seem to find it…
i’ve never used in-app purchase before, so i have a quick question.
if i were to buy a add-on and then later remove the app from my iphone (or use a different iphone) could i just sync the app across with all the add-ons or are they saved according to your itunes account and can just be re-downloaded for free like paid apps?
I think Twitbrid Pro and Hootsuite are the better of the twitter clients. I am immediately turned off by Boxcar’s pricing plan. Push or not… no thank you.
I installed it yesterday and it works fine for me. It is a very very good application! Thanks guys!
There is also another good alternative to Boxcar, App Notifications is a great app and can do pretty much the same thing except Growl notifications. Plus it boasts a great easy to use API. Also there is a one time cost for now and now additional service fees. Also Google Voice is also supported.
https://www.appnotifications.com/
Because Boxcar does not support RSS authentication, it’s actually not possible to use your Basecamp RSS feed with Boxcar.