push-notify: Playing with iPhone push notifications

PushMail is a nice, reasonably priced (2.49 euro, so I guess that’s about $2.99) iPhone application that is intended to realize push mail notifications (see update of my GPush post). It does so by giving you an @dopushmail.com e-mail address. Any e-mail sent or forwarded to that address will not be stored, but rather pushed to your iPhone.

Any mail you send to it.

So I wrote this little bash script, called push-notify:

chmod’ed it +x so I could execute it. Now, I can run it like this:

And “This is a test” will appear on your iPhone. Of course, this has many applications. If you have a long batch job or compilation running and want to know when it has finished executing, you just run the command like this:

and you’ll get a notification when it’s done. With some notification you could probably also receive a notification when something went wrong, when a server reported some exception. As long as you can invoke the push-notify script when it happens, you’ll be notified within seconds.

Powerful stuff.

• Important
• iPhone
• Push