With the release of IPhone OS 3.0 came Push technology to the IPhone world. For those of you who are unfamiliar, there a two basic ways in which your IPhone receives notifications for email, twitter messages, etc.
- Fetch – the phone sends a signal to check for any new messages. This is a major drain on the already weak battery life of the IPhone.
- Push – messages are actually pushed from the server to the phone. No need to fetch equals no loss of battery.
Some email providers (eg. Yahoo) are already push supported so there would be no real excitement behind the release of an app that pushes Yahoo email to the IPhone. Amazingly, however, the most popular email client, Gmail, is not natively push supported on the IPhone. The reason is an entire post in itself, but the fact remains, No Push!
Enter, Ultimate Notifier
I first started beta testing the Ultimate Notifier just after the release of the much anticipated GPush. At that time, GPush was a major FAIL. Twitter was full of GPush complaints: “It doesn’t work at all”, “It doesn’t support Google Apps”, “Is this really all it does?” Since then, GPush has improved its network issues, but in the end still just performs one task.
Ultimate Notifiier explains their application best…
As iPhone developers we decided to do something about it! As we developed Ultimate Notifier it soon became apparent that there were a number of other features that would be really handy, why restrict it to Google Mail? RSS and ATOM feeds, using an aggregation service such as Google Reader or on their own, as well as Twitter (we’re at @ultimatenotify but you can get notifications about any Twitter search you like, including your @replies) and FriendFeed were all things we wanted to be notified about, so we extended our prototype to support these features.
…I have just one thing to add to this explanation. Google Apps for business is supported!
Essentially, Google Apps is Gmail for business (eg. you@yourdomain.com).
Bottom line, I am extremely impressed with this application and have not had any problems so far. Ultimate Notifiier allows customization of just about every detail you could imagine. From the actual message you receive as notification the ability to set a quiet time, Ultimate Notifiier has thought of it all.
Look for this Application in the very near future.
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