Show HN: Hooks – Stay Up to Date on Anything Through Push Notifications | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Hooks – Stay Up to Date on Anything Through Push Notifications

gethooksapp.com

52 pointskozkozkoz29 comments

I have a feature request: I loved the idea at first glance but then I was appalled to discover that there's nowhere to register a callback URL for any of these events.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webhook

To me it just seems obvious that there should be an either/or option for SMS or HTTP especially since a metric shitton of people are already using slack and hipchat.

The transmission costs for HTTP are way more cheap than SMS so it seems like it would be in you guy's interest to support webhooks in order to reduce outbound SMS costs.

TLDR; HTTP is the new SMS

This doesn't strike me as a developer tool (though it could obviously be used by developers). It's for consumers. I don't know of many consumers who want to receive notifications via webhook.

If they did do webhooks then you could write one that sent out SMSs though - leave them to do the hard part while cutting them out of the loop!

Also I think it's push notifications, not SMS.

This kind of thinking reminds me of Twitter in the early days where one founder was trying to pigeonhole it into being for a particular use case. Twitter began it's life as an SMS play also if my memory serves me correctly.

Really it's up to the startup.. do they want to try to eventually become the Internet's primary notification propagation channel or are the only interested in catering to a particular mobile phone use case ?

Hi, we are working on adding this to our API as webhooks, so you can use the content on your app. For now you can check this: https://dev.gethooksapp.com

Nice work - looks like a cross between IFTTT and Pushbullet. What are your differentiating factors?

I came here to ask the same thing, sort of. Pushover and Pushbullet both work with IFTTT, and IIRC used to be the only way to get IFTTT to send you mobile push notifications.

However, now that IFTTT supports push notifications, why do you still need Pushover or Pushbullet?

This is the first I've heard of Pushbullet, and boy is their marketing frustrating. I just spent 5 minutes trying to answer the question "Is this a service which turns an HTTP POST into an iOS push notification?", only to be greeted with answers like "Bring together your devices, friends, and the things you care about". Argh.

In that case you'll like Pushover's home page: https://pushover.net/

There's a sample curl command right there on the page.

EDIT: Pushbullet's home page has a link to API docs, and it took 30 seconds to find this: https://docs.pushbullet.com/#create-push

+1 for Pushover. I'd been using Slack for device notifications, but Pushover is much faster. I've had both running simultaneously and the Slack alerts would sometimes arrive minutes after Pushover.

You might also want to check out Boxcar.

Good question, I love both of this tools, while IFTTT is more about automation, on Hooks we are focusing on notifications only. Our value is the content, it's very easy to create alerts about many things with just one click.

Actually we are working on adding Hooks as an IFTTT channel later this month as a trigger so anyone can build their own receipts.

How does this differ from Pushbullet's channels?

Is this better than Facebook's notify? (Which I actually love - relevant stuff waiting for me on my lock screen without any audio notifications)

It's different. On Facebook Notify you subscribe to a channel and then they decide what you get, very similar to rss feed. On Hooks you customize what you want to get exactly and where you want to get it from, like post with 200 points on HN so you get only the content you asked for.

They should call the app "Get Distracted". Its an interesting idea, and potentially very useful, but most likely its going to become the annoying reason your phone keeps going off every 5 minutes. Will give it a try to see.

Good point, but on average our users get about 1-2 per day as you choose exactly what you want to receive.

Ehh, I'm not sure. In reality I use it mostly for work etc.

I find my distractions are more an internal impulse to check things than an external perturbation by someone else. Having a tool that offloads that from my brain would be useful.

When I first used it, I got overexcited and configured way too many alerts. But I've been trimming it down heavily, and now a fair percentage of the pushes I get are relevant to me.

Cool, how long have you been using Hooks for? Actually this happens a lot, our fault for sure, we need to remove some alerts like "TC all content" :)

For a few months. Also, it's one of the few apps I reinstalled when I switched phones. That says something :)

Why does this need to be an app? What does it do that a website can't?

Well it's about push notifications to your phone, so it has to be an app.

That is not true. [0] [1]

[2] is my crappy push notification service mostly built for my own usage because PushBullet started getting more bloated and annoying.

[0]: https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2015/03/push-notif...

[1]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Push_API

[2]: https://github.com/thefinn93/EasyPush

But you need to have the page open in a browser on your phone, no?

None of these work natively on iOS.

This doesn't work on iOS? I thought it did. [0] claims it can do this on Chrome for iOS, or maybe by native you mean on Safari, which doesn't seem to support it...

[0]: https://storage-cdn.realtime.co/chrome-push/index.html

Yeah by natively I meant without installing 3rd party apps, which is what the GP complained about.

This is just the start. Also some notifications are time sensitive and you always carry your phone with you so you won't miss it.

We are also working on notifications API for Chrome as the next step for the web interface.

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