Comments on: Introducing Silent Diving Seagulls: An XMPP Interface for Desktop Notifications

By: Arioch

Arioch — Fri, 16 Apr 2010 01:26:10 +0000

i think XMPP should give one more unnoticed feature here

XMPP allows number of clients (read: computers, phones, etc) be connected to one account. Each can have its own priority and here/busy/away status.

what it might come to - is forwarding Growl notifications to where am i, following user.

of course, some RFID token woud be best suited technically, it woulld not hapen.

OTOH i easily imagine that with few computers in family i would have 2 jabber cients switched to away due to long idle, and one active. Or some modern wi-fi enbleld phone with me. And so if i am not at computer, then phone would get only high-priority Growl messages, others are lost. If i am at computer - then all messages goes to computer.

This however misses full-screen applications (like games and video), which makes computer inuts not-idle, yet notification should act like it is idle.

By: Jeff Lindsay

Jeff Lindsay — Sun, 16 Aug 2009 05:12:55 +0000

So you’re saying drop XMPP? Oh, I’d love that. :P

By: Colby Russell

Colby Russell — Sun, 16 Aug 2009 04:59:23 +0000

Jeff, of course I use HTTP for more than hypertext, as you've cunningly made me confess. I have no problem with this. Nor do I have problems with the provisions that allow XMPP to flex and carry, e.g., binary data. I applaud this.

I'm critiquing your mechanism, not your payload.

By: Jeff Lindsay

Jeff Lindsay — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 06:09:22 +0000

Colby, while I sympathize with your purist ideals … I think this is OK. Regarding your example, if an image that renders text happens to be easier to work with, I’m all for it. Besides, I’m sure you use HTTP for more than hypertext. And while I hate SOAP, it got away with stupid crap like this, too.

By: Colby Russell

Colby Russell — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 05:58:07 +0000

Argh. While it's nice that you can do title; description; icon for a quick test, doing so (or passing JSON, as you plan to do) is completely missing the point of XMPP. That's like using XML to wrap name=value pairs where the value is a binary blob containing image data that renders out to the text that you want to convey.

By: russell_h

russell_h — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 19:55:23 +0000

Matt, Jeff,

I'm working on something that looks similar to dispatch.io, I'm uncreatively calling it Notiserv2 for now. Its basically a Twisted Python server to server XMPP PubSub implementation, with a web interface and HTTP API.

The flow would go something like this: 1. Create notiserv2 account (via the web) 2. Create a notification node (via the web) 3. Register publisher and subscriber JIDs (via web or XMPP) 4. Generate HTTP API keys 5. Publish via HTTP or XMPP, receive notifications via XMPP

Eventually I envisioned desktop clients (I already have various hackish attempts) that would intercept local notifications and publish them to a specified node, as well as receiving notifications from specified nodes and displaying them on the screen.

I'm in the fairly early stages of developing all of this, and I'm not sure exactly how it could fit in with these other projects, but I'd certainly be interested in some sort of collaboration.

By: Jeff Lindsay

Jeff Lindsay — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 18:52:57 +0000

Hey Matt, nice project! It seems to overlap with what we’re trying to accomplish. Maybe we should talk about combining forces if we’re actually on the same page. ;)

By: Matt

Matt — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 16:52:44 +0000

I’m working on something called dispatch, (http://www.dispatch.io) that provides a HTTP API to a backend XMPP server. To receive notifications, I created a client that runs in the background and logs into the XMPP server, sending messages on to Growl. (http://github.com/mattking17/DispatchClient/tree/master).

I’d like to help or contribute to this project, contact me if you are interested.