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Get your social notifications on the cheap with Boxcar

by Brett Kelly Oct 28th 2009 at 10:00AM

Since the arrival of the Push Notifications feature in iPhone OS 3.0, all manner of apps have added support for it. Games, task management applications, you name it -- they're all more than happy to make your phone beep at you in the middle of the night and prompt your spouse to kindly insist that you silence that infernal device. Or so I've heard.

It seems like a no-brainer to me that this type of functionality would exist among the throngs of social networking applications. If the game where you flick the thing while the music is playing can tell me when I've got a new challenger from the Far East, why can't my favorite Twitter client let me know when I've got a new direct message? Sadly, most of the apps in the store (as far as I know) haven't implemented this functionality yet. I realize that it has some sporadic adoption, but certainly not the universal support that I personally expected.

Enter Boxcar [iTunes Link]. This little free app has existed in the store for months now and has received some very nice reviews, and for good reason. I've been a faithful user of this app for many moons and I find it pretty indispensable. Here's how it works:

When you install the app (which is free at the time of this writing), you can choose to enable a single service for notification -- Twitter, Facebook or an email account. It will poll the selected service at a short interval and send you a standard push notification message if there are any updates. In the case of Twitter, you can configure it to open one of several supported Twitter client apps. If you want to enable additional services, you can do so through the in-app purchase mechanism, and most options cost $.99US.

I'm a big fan of Boxcar and use it for Twitter and Facebook. It's one of those free applications that's actually worth more than what you're paying for it -- a quality that's becoming increasingly rare among free iPhone apps these days! Version 2.1 was just released a few days ago and includes several new features like support for Facebook Mail and better accessibility.

Pick up Boxcar now for free from the App Store.

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Since the arrival of the Push Notifications feature in iPhone OS 3.0, all manner of apps have added support for it. Games, task management...
 

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16 Comments

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Jack Brewster

I've been beta testing Ultimate Notifier - http://www.ultimatenotifier.com/ - for awhile now and I'm very happy with it.

Twitter, FriendFeed, Gmail, Google Apps, POP, IMAP - it's all in one.

Probably my biggest favorite feature is the ability to define when I get alerts. I've completely disabled the iPhone's new mail alerts and have the notifications set to turn off at night. I can actually leave my phone on my nightstand now.

The biggest problem at this point is that the app has been in review forever (originally submitted on 9/19).

October 28 2009 at 5:07 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Jason

I am a absolutely devout fan of Prowl, written by zac west.

Great software, great service, great integration. More flexible than boxcar too.

October 28 2009 at 2:55 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
J

Not working...I keep getting an NSURLErrorDomain error 403. I'm def connected to the internet...maybe the servers are down?

October 28 2009 at 2:08 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
2 replies to J's comment
Jonathan George

We see that error with some, but not all, jailbroken devices. You've installed something that is preventing your device from either a) connecting to HTTPS services or b) sending your UDID. Unfortunately, I haven't been able to track down which unauthorized package it is.

October 28 2009 at 3:13 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
IGx89

Turn on push notifications. I had them off and got that same error when I tried to register, but once I turned them on and tried again it then worked.

October 29 2009 at 11:43 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Rob E.

I like this ap, but it has a few issues: The badge shows you how many push notifications you have received from Boxcar, but, as far as I can tell, you can't read them. Opening the ap simply resets the count. As a result if you miss a notification because it was replaced by another notification, you'll never know what you missed. Also if your phone was off or, if you have an iPod Touch, out of Wifi range, the messages you missed you will never know about.

Also, while the ap itself and the first service are free, every additional service costs 1.99. I'm probably just being stingy, but .99/service seems more reasonable.

Right now I'm using Boxcar for Facebook because anything I really don't want to miss will also show up in my e-mail. I get Push notifications of Twitter posts via Twitterific (desktop), Growl, and Prowl. I could do something similar with Facebook if the ap I use for that didn't keep crashing. Something similar gives me e-mail notifications, but that has not been very helpful as it just says, "You have a new e-mail" or something like that, rather than any sender/subject info. Boxcar looks like it has much better solution for e-mail notifications.

I like the idea of Boxcar, and I'd probably be less stingy and add more services, but for now I like how Prowl saves my messages. Prowl also plans to cache those messages for offline viewing, which would be great for me, since I have an iPod Touch, but might not be a feature that useful to an iPhone user. But Boxcar is a much easier solution to set up, and it doesn't require you leave programs running on your home machine, so I can see it being very attractive to many people, including myself if they ever address the couple of issues I have with it.

October 28 2009 at 10:33 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
4 replies to Rob E.'s comment
Caleb

Second that. Echofon (formerly Twitterfon) supports push notifications and works perfectly. You do have to purchase the full version ($1.99 if I remember correctly) for push.

October 28 2009 at 10:31 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
David

A much better Twitter app with push notifications is Twitbit. IMO it's better then Tweetie (either version) and included push notifications, which is the kicker for me.

October 28 2009 at 10:16 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
billchase2

For Twitter, use Echofon. It supports Push Notifications.

October 28 2009 at 10:16 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
magnus77

"It will poll the selected service at a short interval and send you a standard push notification message if there are any updates"
Doesn't sound like push to me

October 28 2009 at 10:06 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
2 replies to magnus77's comment
Brett Kelly

I probably could have been a little clearer in wording this - sorry about that. The Boxcar app maintains a separate server that does the polling and notifications - it doesn't actually happen on your device.

October 28 2009 at 10:13 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
magnus77

Ok, thanks for clearing that up

October 28 2009 at 10:16 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
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