Using Notify.io without a Mac

[Ramana]

I can't figure out how to use Notify.io; the website really wants me
to
download the desktop app, but I don't think I can use it since it's a
Mac
application and I'm on Linux. Furthermore, it's way overkill for me to
download some application just to get a web service to send me some
emails.

If you'll indulge me, let me describe what I want from this service,
and
then tell me whether I've come to the right place:
- Use the Commitify service as a source of notifications.
(Commitify introduced here
http://groups.google.com/group/notify-io/browse_thread/thread/629d8510223af73f)
- Use my Gmail email address (same one for logging in to notify.io)
as a destination for notifications.
- Add another person's email as an additional destination (or even
have
them add it themselves).

Is Notify.io the right thing for getting emails from Commitify?

How can I set it up?

[Jeff Lindsay]

Yeah, you don't need the desktop client if you don't want desktop notifications. You can just not download the client. 

Having two emails for a source is interesting. You *may* be able to put two into a single email outlet, but it seems like this simple functionality should be directly supported by GitHub's services? Although it seems like a reasonable use case that's not all that easy to do with Notify.io ...

Anybody have suggestions on how to improve this for Notify.io? Perhaps the most obvious is to support multiple outlets for a source.

-jeff

--
Jeff Lindsay
http://progrium.com

[Ramana Kumar]

On Thu, Sep 23, 2010 at 8:47 AM, Jeff Lindsay <prog...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Yeah, you don't need the desktop client if you don't want desktop
> notifications. You can just not download the client.

The website seems fairly unusable without the client, though.
If I set up Commitfy correctly, should it magically appear in my list
of sources, or do I have to do something extra?

> Having two emails for a source is interesting. You *may* be able to put two
> into a single email outlet, but it seems like this simple functionality
> should be directly supported by GitHub's services? Although it seems like a
> reasonable use case that's not all that easy to do with Notify.io ...
> Anybody have suggestions on how to improve this for Notify.io? Perhaps the
> most obvious is to support multiple outlets for a source.

Supporting multiple outlets does seem like basic desirable functionality,
and I'd love to see you do it.

Unfortunately, GitHub's native email service also doesn't support multiple
addresses. Plus it doesn't even seem to work with a single address, hence my
looking for alternative methods like commitify+notify.io.

[Jeff Lindsay]

The website seems fairly unusable without the client, though.
If I set up Commitfy correctly, should it magically appear in my list
of sources, or do I have to do something extra?

If you get it to send you a notification, the site will show on the right a request for Commitify to send you notifications. If you allow it, then you'll start getting notifications from Commitify to whatever outlet you set it up with.

 

Supporting multiple outlets does seem like basic desirable functionality,
and I'd love to see you do it.

There are a lot of different things you start getting into here for different use cases. Since there are other higher priority issues to take care of, I've been deferring solving the multiple outlet feature request. 

[Ramana Kumar]

On Thu, Sep 23, 2010 at 9:07 AM, Jeff Lindsay <prog...@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> The website seems fairly unusable without the client, though.
>> If I set up Commitfy correctly, should it magically appear in my list
>> of sources, or do I have to do something extra?
>>
>
> If you get it to send you a notification, the site will show on the right a
> request for Commitify to send you notifications. If you allow it, then
> you'll start getting notifications from Commitify to whatever outlet you set
> it up with.

All right I just sent a notification from GitHub via Commitify, but
nothing has appeared on the notify.io website.
Maybe I should hope the commitify maintainer is reading this, and ask
whether there's any way to debug whether it got past the commitify
stage...

>
>>
>> Supporting multiple outlets does seem like basic desirable functionality,
>> and I'd love to see you do it.
>
> There are a lot of different things you start getting into here for
> different use cases. Since there are other higher priority issues to take
> care of, I've been deferring solving the multiple outlet feature request.

Hang on, maybe we're misunderstanding each other. It seems easy to add
two Email "outlets" on the notify.io website, with different
addresses. Now when I (eventually, if this ever happens) get a source
to appear on the website, is the problem that I won't be able to
connect it to more than one of those outlets?

[Jeff Lindsay]

Hang on, maybe we're misunderstanding each other. It seems easy to add
two Email "outlets" on the notify.io website, with different
addresses. Now when I (eventually, if this ever happens) get a source
to appear on the website, is the problem that I won't be able to
connect it to more than one of those outlets?

Correct. 

[David Reese]

All right I just sent a notification from GitHub via Commitify, but
nothing has appeared on the notify.io website.
Maybe I should hope the commitify maintainer is reading this, and ask
whether there's any way to debug whether it got past the commitify
stage...

the Commitify maintainer is indeed reading this!

I do see some errors on app engine -- "'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\xeb'", whatever that means. Maybe you had a unicode character in your commit message?  Python isn't my native language, and I didn't know I was specifying ascii... I'll look at it. I'll get back to you off the list.

Hang on, maybe we're misunderstanding each other. It seems easy to add
two Email "outlets" on the notify.io website, with different
addresses. Now when I (eventually, if this ever happens) get a source
to appear on the website, is the problem that I won't be able to
connect it to more than one of those outlets?

You could of course have the owner of the other email set it up, the same as you have it. Though it's a lot of work for just email, as you say.

david

[Jeff Lindsay]

There are a lot of interesting topologies possible here ... if you really think about it (hard), there are a LOT of different use cases and ways to route messages. Once we handle stability issues, I'm going to rethink a lot of the system design (publicly). One of the ideas is to have a Groups concept, which would allow what I previously called "ad-hoc sources", as well as an easy way for doing these kinds of multicast notifications (set up a group of people to receive, route to that group instead of an outlet, for example).