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.

Agile Messenger was recently updated to support iPhone OS 3.0's push notifications. The obvious comparison will be to BeejiveIM, since they both do the same thing: provide a multi-client chat app offering push notifications on your iPhone. We'll have a hands-on with Beejive later, but this is how Agile Messenger (iTunes link) works. Oh, and we're giving away five promo codes so you can try it yourself, just check the end of this post.

The first screen in Agile Messenger is a series of switches for each protocol supported. These switches make it easy to see what you're connecting to when you tap the Connect button. There's support for ICQ, MSN, AIM, Yahoo, Jabber and Google. You can only log in to one account per service, however, so if you have 2 Google accounts, you're going to log in to one at a time. I'm told they are working to change this.

Once you are connected, Agile sets your status to "Available." If you close out of the app the defaults will set your status to "Away," although I soon changed it to keep me available even if I close out the app. In addition to your status, Agile adds the "Mobile with AgileMessenger" message, which I could do without. You can change this behavior in the app's preferences but you can only toggle it off. If you want to change your status, you have to change each account separately, instead of one global change. That's a bummer. There's a setting to auto-connect in the preferences, if you'd rather skip a step.

Agile's menus use rounded rectangles everywhere, and pop up like the old VH-1 series, Pop-Up Video. It's a nice visual touch, and if you want to back out of a menu just tap anywhere else on the screen but in the menu -- slightly faster than a dedicated Back button. By using the pop-up menus you can drill down into anything, but mostly contact management and preferences. Once in preferences, the buttons become standard iPhone UI, which is good, because there are bunches of switches. Pictures of the preferences in the gallery.

Read on for more on picture messaging, chatting and push notifications.

Note: AOL Instant Messenger is a product from AOL, which is also the corporate parent of TUAW & Weblogs Inc.

If you're a developer running the iPhone 3.0 beta, you may have gotten a special note in your email today -- and judging by the number of you who let us know about the news, there's plenty of those emails going around. Apple is testing the long-awaited push notification feature of the 3.0 software (and the back-end servers that provide the updates) with a build of the Associated Press news update app. If you got an email with a promo code and you've been putting the app through its paces, do let us know how it's going.

Push notification is all well and good, but what about true background processing for those critical applications that need always-on connectivity? More on the prospects for that capability in our next post, coming up shortly.

Thanks to everyone who sent this in.

[H/T to Engadget]

Former TUAW blogger Erica Sadun has a cautionary post for developers regarding the pending push notifications coming to iPhone OS 3.0: better get yourself some reliable servers. The implication, delivered via headline, is that smaller developers won't be able to afford push notification. Indeed, as Erica says, coding for an app that can run in the background is one thing -- you may need to scale things down a bit for resource management -- but deploying a reliable push notification system is a tall order by comparison.

Instead of coding once and deploying, developers will now have to manage servers to handle the load of users who will be receiving push notifications. This ongoing server maintenance issue is the sort of thing we used to laugh about when digg first started, or Twitter, or MySpace, or any number of services that grew a little ahead of server capacity. After speaking to one of the network engineers at Twitter during SxSW this year, I don't envy the task of staying ahead of these curves. But push, in my opinion, isn't as onerous as that.

Push notifications aren't serving entire pages. The difference in data throughput overall is much slimmer than even the light pages Twitter serves. Erica correctly points out that in aggregate, the push server might be hit pretty frequently; however, and there's more of a concern with reliability for a finance or medical app than something like Twitter or digg. But even when you throw in the added hurdle of security I'm guessing the resources for this are available at a reasonable cost.

I get that this is more work for developers, but Erica makes it sound a little threatening, like developers' only resolution will be to cobble together a mighty datacenter from spare computer parts. My assertion is that developers who wish to play the push game will simply need to look for outside resources and factor that into their price. Maybe fewer $.99 apps is a good thing? You certainly don't need 30 apps trying to alert you during the day -- how would you get anything done?

In the end, push notifications are welcome, and I'd rather have that than a one-hour battery life for the day. Plus, I would agree that some smaller developers will have to forget push because the potential costs are too high. Guess what? That's as it should be. If your product requires it, your cost should reflect it. There's no shortage of service providers out there, and as we've seen in the past (look at the podcast services that popped up when that blew up a few years ago) the market will fill the needs of the developers if they aren't in the business of making their own server farms. It's certainly a new twist to the iPhone dev game, and it's an opportunity for someone who can deliver a reliable push framework at a reasonable price -- perhaps one running atop Amazon's EC2, Google's App Engine or even Microsoft's Azure cloud service.

Possibly thanks to a chatty Emirates Telecom/Etisalat executive, we have some more details about when we might see a new iPhone handset: June. While not directly attributed to Mark Davis, iPhone program director at Etisalat, a quote in the report reads that the "next version of the device, which is due out in June, will be launched in the UAE at the same time." Analysts had been hoping for a new iPhone handset sometime during the first half of the year. [Via AppleInsider.]

Nokia is apparently readying smartphones that contain touch technology, advanced 3G connectivity, and multimedia functions in a bid to regain control of the mobile phone market. The devices, so far named "IP08" and "Eitri" will have touch capability, but it's unclear if either device will raise Apple's ire when it comes to protecting its intellectual property surrounding multi-touch gestures. The "Eitri" model will allegedly feature haptic feedback, as well. [Via Electronista.]

Finally, MacRumors.com has some tidbits about what Apple is doing to replace the so-far-missing Push Notification System that Mike mentioned this morning. Instead, Arnold Kim hears that Apple may allow one or two "user-selectable background processes" on current hardware with a software update, and more processes on new hardware (thanks to hardware improvements). [Via MacRumors.]

Wherefore art thou, Push? Macworld has gone in search of the much-awaited iPhone feature that would let applications get their own notifications even while not necessarily active (so apps like Twitterific could have a little red number on them showing the number of unread tweets, and so on). But the Push system was "pulled" (still makes me laugh) from the 2.1 firmware during the beta phase, and as you probably know by now, it's still not on your iPhone.

Unfortunately, there's no official news on the subject (Apple hasn't canceled the service completely, as far as we know, but would they really tell anybody if they did), but Macworld has a few ideas: it could be that Apple has abandoned the system, thinking that it didn't really help as much as they thought it would, or Apple is still working on it, or Apple is working on something even better. Which one of those you decide is true probably depends on what you think about Apple in general, so we'll let you make your own guesses on that.

But we will say this: we're near the end of the known roadmap for the iPhone, and people are already talking about a new version of the hardware. If we don't see an update on Push in the next refresh, it's probably likely that the only thing the notification system will be pushing is daises.

CrunchGear notes that a version of the iPhone Push Notification Service API has been released to "a handful" of developers, and, according to them, will "surely" be released to everyone when iPhone OS 2.1 is released.

If you remember our WWDC keynote coverage (around 11:05 a.m.), the Push Notification Service maintains a connection with third party servers to alert you via an icon badge, custom sounds, or text alerts.

An app that uses this feature isn't really running in the background, but instead sort of registering itself with a metaphorical "hotel operator" that lives in your phone. Once there's something new to tell you, the hotel operator notifies you.

Hopefully this has little effect on battery life, but without actual, real-world use, it's hard to say.

Apple has finally posted three new iPhone 3G commercials on their website. In these ads, Apple seems to be pushing (quite literally) the features of the new iPhone 3G/2.0 firmware. Push, half the price, twice as fast, and other Jobsian quotes are in these new ads.

Just in case you were wondering, the song playing in the background of the new commercials is You, Me and the Bourgeoisie by the Submarines (iTunes link). You can watch Everyone, Unslow, and Work Friendly on the iPhone ads website.


Thanks to everyone who sent this in!

Many commenters and bloggers hither and yon have noticed that MobileMe lacks "true push" capabilities, even though Apple uses the "push" buzzword extensively to describe MobileMe services.

A commenter in a MacRumors thread about the subject took screenshots from Apple's site, showing they had removed the phrase "Push happens automatically, instantly, and continuously." In its place, Apple clarifies that changes from the iPhone and web apps are updated instantly on connected computers, but not vice versa.

Apple also notes in a Knowledge Base article that changes "made on your computer will be synced to the MobileMe 'cloud' once every 15 minutes (or every hour in Mac OS X 10.4.11)."

That, to me, doesn't sound like "push," it sounds like "sync." The term "push" still applies, however, to me.com email, as that shows up immediately (in my experience, at least.) Calendars and contacts, though, not so much, apparently.

[Via BetaNews.]

MobileMe, the successor to Apple's lackluster .Mac service, is poised to bring subscribers into the realm of "cloud computing," one of those nauseating phrases that's been around for a while, but nobody has a better term for.

MobileMe provides email, calendaring, contact management, photo sharing, and online file storage to Windows, Mac, iPhone, and iPod touch users for $99. A family pack subscription is also available for $149, which adds four 5GB accounts to a standard-sized 20GB account (making 40GB of storage total).

Users can also add 20GB or 40GB of storage to their account for $49 and $99, respectively.

MobileMe got off to a really rough start last week, but we still don't know exactly where the hangup was during the transition. I know I'm interested to know what happened, but for now, let's just all be glad that it's working, and have us a look-see at what's new.

After the jump, join me for an in-depth look at MobileMe's features, and how they compare to .Mac and other free services available elsewhere on the web.

The addition of a Yahoo! sync framework in 10.4.10 certainly seems a bit puzzling on the surface, but after some grinding of my mental cogs, I think I've figured it out.

If you will think back to MacWorld 2007 and the announcement of the iPhone, you'll remember that Steve Jobs brought three special guests on stage. Stuffed between Eric Schmidt and Stan Sigman (of Google and Cingular, respectively) was Jerry Yang from Yahoo! who used his time to talk about the free Yahoo! IMAP "push" email that will be bundled with every iPhone.

With an email account comes a contact list, and in this day and age of do-everything service providers, a calendar usually comes with it. It makes sense then that Apple would make it possible to edit and sync these things from your desktop– thus the new framework. Sure, I can do all that from my iPhone, but do I really want to enter and tweak 300 address book entries on such a small device?

Obviously, this is just idle postulation, but I'd be surprised if something like this didn't get announced before the release of the iPhone later this month.