Open third party apps using their URLscheme & psyBNC + Prowl

[DerFlash]

Hi there,

first of all: thanks for the great app! Works fine using TwitterJunkie on my 24/7 running MacMini for notifying me about @messages on twitter.

But I even have a feature request:

Adding an url-scheme to every prowl message based on the growling app and this way providing the possibility to just open the appropriate iPhone app by double tapping the prowl message would be great! Maybe this can optionally also open the linked iPhone app automatically using the "Show" button of the push message :-)

Hope you know what I mean ;-)
This would make prowl nearly perfect for me since twitter-prowls could open a twitter app and irc-prowls of a irc bouncer could open my own app Rooms ;-)

Best regards
Björn

[zac]

A feature—though I'm not sure if it's going to land in 1.1 or 1.2—to redirect arbitrary applications to other applications will probably be implemented. I just need to compile the list of URL schemes apps offer, and provide a way to update it in-application.

[DerFlash]

Yey! Thanks for the info. Can't wait to see this implemented.

Furthermore because I wrote a very nice HowTo for my app today and found Prowl playing great with my BNC and a little scripting.

I'm quiet impressed about this nice way to get notified about my updates on IRC while I'm not connected...

Yet without this url scheme feature I think many of my users (btw >20.000 users bought my Rooms app so far) will buy Prowl now ;-)
So please let me know as soon as you add this last little thing to make it even better.


PS: If you could also add my HowTo to the API section on the Prowl website, this would be nice

[zac]

Looking at your howto there, you probably need to URL encode the parameters you're passing, or else it'll choke whenever it reaches invalid input. Or if someone has an amperstand in their message.

[DerFlash]

Looking at your howto there, you probably need to URL encode the parameters you're passing, or else it'll choke whenever it reaches invalid input. Or if someone has an amperstand in their message.

Hmm, should already be urlencoded using /bin/php & rawurlencode() within my scripts. But I'm still searching for a better way without using php.

[Edit]
Found one. Using perl should be a bit better, cause I think there are more servers with perl than with php out there...

[zac]

The next version of Prowl will have the ability to open other applications for push notifications.

[whoknew]

I really hope to see Prowl turn more into it's desktop counterpart. Not sure how far you want to take this but it would be great to see places like Skype and Facebook taking full advantage of you app like the many applications do with Growl.

One of the things I was disappointed about with apple when they announced Push Support was that their was no unified application to store all the push notifications. You may ask why I would want this considering Growl does not even have a place that it stores all the notifications it receives. However, I know this is something necessary on the iPhone OS because we are not always able to check why the Phone rang. This being said I see great potential with Prowl and expect great things in the future from this app.

I do not know how far fetched my idea of getting companies like Skype and Facebook to embrace your API and allow users to have one centralized location for all their push notifications but it would be really cool!

Keep up the great work!

[zac]

I would be surprised, but I would definitely need their help to scale upwards to support that kind of a user base.

That being said, DerFlash, what's the URL scheme for Rooms? Does it register for irc:// like Colloquy Mobile does?

[DerFlash]

I would be surprised, but I would definitely need their help to scale upwards to support that kind of a user base.

That being said, DerFlash, what's the URL scheme for Rooms? Does it register for irc:// like Colloquy Mobile does?

Yep, irc:// is the standard scheme of IRC clients. If you just use 'irc:' as link it will just open up the app without asking to add the given connection (irc:// will result in a connection url to 'localhost') ... Actually I'm using the link http://open.roomsapp.mobi within my psyBNC->Prowl messages, which redirects to just 'irc:'



btw... It's a bit problematic if a user installes two clients and remove the second (iPhone doesn't seem to give the opening handle back to the first app then), but thats Apples fault ;-)

[DerFlash]

* Little update *

Made some more changes to the wiki entry. I improved the psyBNC script alot and also added a sBNC script which I got by mail.

Regards
DerFlash