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

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18 points by kitx 10 years ago · 21 comments

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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.

  • kitxOP 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.

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.

    • kitxOP 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.

  • kitxOP 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?

  • kitxOP 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?

  • kitxOP 10 years ago

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

kitxOP 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.

    • kitxOP 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?

    • kitxOP 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.

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