Show HN: Aura, Native OS X Notifications for Gmail and Google Apps

Show HN: Aura, Native OS X Notifications for Gmail and Google Apps(crosscoded.com)

18 points by kitx 10 years ago | 20 comments

geekrax 10 years ago |

Interesting. Not a huge fan of marketing it as "Absolutely Free" and not mentioning the charge for multiple accounts.

I currently use Checker Plus for Gmail Chrome extension: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/checker-plus-for-g.... Does the job very well.

kitx 10 years ago | |

Yep, I realise that 'Absolutely free' is a bad choice of words and I will amend. Thanks for the feedback

nullIsAnObject 10 years ago |

Just a heads-up, I installed it and signed in with one of my two accounts, but then decided to switch the one free account to my other account. After removing the original account, I wasn't given the option to add in the single free account, only upgrade (I'm guessing there was an assumption in the code that the user would always have one account, and never remove it?). Uninstalling/reinstalling didn't give me the option to re-register, either.

kitx 10 years ago | |

Yes, indeed a bug. Thanks for the headsup, I'm on it.

elithrar 10 years ago |

Does this work with Inbox (as in, clicking on the notification opens the Inbox UI, not Gmail)?

omgmog 10 years ago | |

Seems not to currently.

kitx 10 years ago | | |

I would gladly support Inbox, but I can't currently link to a specific thread in Inbox, so clicking a notification would just dump you at the inbox of your email account.

Behind the scenes, it looks to me like Inbox is a new GUI on top of the same Gmail backend, so if the thread linking was fixed this certainly looks possible.

jd3 10 years ago |

Interesting service. I definitely prefer my e-mail notifications to come right from SeaMonkey, but I could see this being useful for those who don't use a separate mail client and prefer to not have their gmail open in a separate tab 24/7.

kitx 10 years ago | |

Sure. A significant amount of people like having their entire inbox locally downloaded (and seemingly more common in the tech industry) but there's also a lot of people that keep it all in the cloud.

yoz-y 10 years ago |

I wonder about the example gmail addresses given. Do you own john, paul, george at gmail? I know we should use example.com for URL examples, are there any non-assigned addresses for well-known mail services?

kitx 10 years ago | |

Nope, I'm just a fan of the Beatles.

I don't know about assigned addresses, but for a long time Apple has used an imaginary John Appleseed.

charlieegan3 10 years ago |

Any plans to post this on ProductHunt?

kitx 10 years ago | |

I would love to post it on Product Hunt. I just don't have posting privileges on there yet.

charlieegan3 10 years ago | | |

Let me know if you want me to post it for you, under your Twitter handle.

kitx 10 years ago |

Happy to answer any questions, this has been a little side project of mine with Swift and Google's Gmail API.

huslage 10 years ago | |

Why in-app purchase instead of just making the app $5?? This is akin to a demo version and it's a bit misleading to call it Free.

kitx 10 years ago | | |

My reasoning was that most people only have one email account and thus would be fine with the free version.

As to why in-app purchase, I wanted people to be able to use it first without payment. In-app purchase has been growing in popularity on the App Stores lately and I think this is why. I also feel it's cleaner not to have two separate versions on the App Store.

But thanks for the feedback, I guess you're right. It's misleading to call it free. I will amend the landing page to make it clearer.

geekrax 10 years ago | |

Does it poll the email servers frequently or it's receiving IMAP notifications directly?

kitx 10 years ago | | |

There is no use of IMAP, it's using the Gmail API. It does poll the Gmail API frequently which is currently the recommended method of checking for new email according to Google.

I know at some point they will switch to PubSubHubbub as the preferred way to get notifications.