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Boxcar Beta for Mac available, brings notifications to Mac

by Chris White Mar 31st 2011 at 4:30PM

Today brings a delightful surprise for Mac users with Boxcar joining the Mac family. Boxcar has been the standard for getting push notifications from your social networks, email, RSS and other services on iOS devices since it launched in July of 2009, and it has been one of my favorite iPhone apps from the start.

Boxcar currently supports more Twitter events than you probably have time to read, including mentions, direct messages, new followers, trending topics, Twitter list updates and keyword searches. Boxcar also supports other social networks for notifications from Facebook, check-ins from Gowalla and Foursquare, even Google Buzz.

It can also help you keep up on new emails, voicemail and SMS messages on Google Voice, popular reddit items, comments and messages, Github comments and facts from OMGFacts. Boxcar can watch for RSS feed updates, helping to make it more customizable if your favorite service isn't built-in, since many social networks, news aggregators and blogs will provide you with an RSS feed that Boxcar can follow.

All of these services are optional; you can customize alerts so that you don't get overwhelmed with too many notifications, or you can mute the notifications entirely when you need to concentrate.

I'm excited that their service can now help me out on my Mac as well as on my iPhone and iPad. While I have some of these notifications already covered by other apps, I've often wished for something simple, dependable and attractive to aggregate alerts together in order to save space on my Dock and menubar. Boxcar fits perfectly, and it supports Growl notifications, so it's easy to integrate into a finely tuned Growl workflow.

While Boxcar for OS X is still in beta, this probably isn't an app you want to wait on if it can increase your productivity or perhaps provide a pleasant distraction when something happens on your favorite social network.

[via MacStories]



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Today brings a delightful surprise for Mac users with Boxcar joining the Mac family. Boxcar has been the standard for getting push...
 

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8 Comments

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nick

I love this app on iOS and I like what I see in the Mac OS X implementation so far.

However, there is a fatal flaw for me. They're not sending credentials over SSL. I'd prefer all of their traffic be moved over SSL, but credentials are a bare minimum. As long as they're sending those in the clear, I can't use it.

Hope to see this fixed!

March 31 2011 at 10:14 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
2 replies to nick's comment
Jonathan George

Nick - you're right. Fixed in Boxcar 1.1, which is now available either by choosing "Check for updates" or by re-downloading Boxcar.

April 01 2011 at 12:07 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
nick

Awesome. Thanks! Is iOS now using SSL as well?

April 01 2011 at 8:09 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Sauri

On iOS it's good because of push notifications but how is it better than any other desktop rss-reader / aggregator, like the Socialite, for instance?

March 31 2011 at 6:46 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
2 replies to Sauri's comment
Chris White

There are a few differences, they have slightly different purposes, Boxcar just wants you to get alerts, do some simple in-app responses but really to pass you on to the appropriate app or site for the notification.

However, the largest difference is that while Socialite and other clients need to be running and connected to the web to capture anything. With Boxcar the collection task is taken on by their servers, while you won't get alerts without Boxcar running they don't just disappear and it's all tied together with your iOS devices and the site.

I think the distinctions will become a lot clearer as the Boxcar for Mac moves further along in the beta.

March 31 2011 at 7:02 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Sauri

Ah, caught the difference, thank you.

March 31 2011 at 7:16 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Chris White

The iOS version is free with as many services as you'd like but with some advertising. You can remove the ads with an in-app purchase for $5, I just checked with the developer and he the Mac version will use the same model for now.

My friend David Chartier over at Macworld is reporting that according to the developer there are a few other plans for revenue that may be coming soon but that Boxcar will always provide the core experience across multiple devices for free.

http://www.macworld.com/article/158970/2011/03/boxcar_mac.html

March 31 2011 at 5:46 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Susana

For how much?

March 31 2011 at 5:18 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
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