Notify Your Android?
Following my recent move into the World of Android I’ve been looking into notification apps that I can hook into and send message to using Perl.
Luckily for me there was already a perl module, WebService::NotifyMyAndroid, that had already done the hard work of communicating with the API at Notify My Android.
As with all thing, it hadn’t seen a release in about a year, and the sneaky NMA guys had changed all their URLs - breaking the module’s calls.
As an interested hacker I took a copy of the code and made the appropriate changes to get it up and running again.
Last night, after emailing the module’s author and having a short conversation I became co-maintainer of the module.
This morning I uploaded v0.0.3 to the CPAN.
Merry Festive Time!
Why use their service - not Google Cloud Messaging directly?
Mostly because I wasn't aware it existed. Still, I think it's nice to have the module updated and functioning again for those that want to experiment with Perl and the NMA site/app.
I'll have a look at the cloud messaging soon - sounds interesting.
Having a quick exploratory skim, isn't Notify My Android a generic implementation of all the pain I'd need to go through to send notifications to an android device?
I'm not writing device/android applications that want to display a notification, I want 'something' that can trigger a notification on my devices.
With NMA, I can set up rules (in gmail) to forward specific messages to an NMA address linked to my account there, and I get a notification on my phone. Yes, I'll see the email eventually, but there are some things that I'd like to be made aware of more quickly.
I can also include device alerting in scripts or applications using the API.
All without writing my own receiving client application for my device. NMA just saves me a lot of time, effort and learning (android programming) that I'd rather postpone for now.
Unless I've seriously misunderstood GCM and there's a simple and quick way to use it to make notifications appear on my devices.