I am curious about the answer to Jeff Lindsay's comment. Why do we need another app in this space when there is a powerful free open-source framework for doing this (http://notify.io)?
Jeff contacted me after I launched. We are in the middle of a conversation about this, but we both had to go to dinner (he with a group, and I hadn't eaten all day).
His concerns are valid, but we are both wanting to finish our discussion (it is/was quite open).
However, the canonical answer to "why do we need another X in this space" is "why did google need to be another search engine?" It may be that we are fulfilling different demands, and we both agree that competition is better for everyone involved.
Notifo has a shipping product which does notifications on a phone. notify.io has describes telephone clients as something which may possible be available eventually.
I started notify.io with Jeff and you're misunderstanding what notify.io is. We have clients not just for the iPhone, but also for the Mac, Windows, Ubuntu and Android. You should check it out before describing it as "telephone clients".
Here's how I came to my apparently mistaken impression that you do not have shipping clients for phones and thus bear no resemblance to this product:
1) I went to notify.io and looked for a list of supported platforms, and saw prominent notices that your problem is described as "Get desktop notifications from web applications" and that the quickstart suggestions presume use of a Mac client.
2) I looked at every top-level navigation element for a list of supported platforms, and failed to find it.
3) I dug around a bit for the development blog via Google, and found a roadmap post from January, which included: "Outlets repesent the other major feature of Notify.io. They’re ways you can get a notification. ... Currently supported Outlets besides Desktop Notifier are Email, Jabber IM, and Webhooks. Outlets to look forward to are SMS, Twitter, IRC, and perhaps telephone."
Now, as one OSS developer to another, let me say this as gently as I possibly can: if you want people to think of you when someone says "mobile notifications", you should probably note somewhere fairly conspicuous that you actually support mobile notifications.
I agree with all these points. Some of them are out of practicality since it's not fulltime.
Btw, telephone means actually calling you via telephony, not mobile. However, an iPhone client is planned.
Obviously marketing something like this is hard. Notifo starts with a niche so it's easy. We did too: desktop notifications. But hey hey, we also do a lot more.
Anyway, we are a lot more badass, address some problems Notifo doesn't, but we just don't have a mobile client yet. Womp womp. We'll see who can be the better platform though...
You're exactly right: marketing something like this is hard. But writing the code is harder. Making it open source was risky, but brave. Oh, the perpetual downfall of open platforms.
You're handling this extremely well, btw. I've had my work ripped off before, and it is beyond upsetting.
Exactly. I've searched and searched again, and can't find any information about where to find the ubuntu-client. Nor could I find anything about how to get notifications through XMPP/jabber.
It's such a promising concept, but this way I don't think a lot of users will catch up on it.
Yeah uh, I should finish up the android notify.io app and put it up in the app store. There's a semi-functional android alpha at http://github.com/newhouseb/Noid for anyone interested in getting involved.
in addition, notify.io has iphone support through Prowl (a non-free app, which I have used for a long time), but notifo has a native iphone client with tight integration for notifo's own infrastructure.
