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peterphalen / Archives-and-Absences

Android app that notifies you when police kill someone in the United States. After seeing this app for iOS I contacted its creator Josh Begley and offered to develop it for android. Download free on Google Play: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=phalen.peter.archives
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Parse Push alternative... #1

Closed JesseScott closed 7 years ago

JesseScott commented 8 years ago

I'm sure you know this, but deprecation is coming... :dancer:

peterphalen commented 8 years ago

Yeah, early 2017 :/ Do you know of any obvious alternatives? Preferably free...

JesseScott commented 8 years ago

Urban Airship: https://www.urbanairship.com/

JesseScott commented 8 years ago

MixPanel might also be an option, but can get pricy really fast (there is a free tier)

peterphalen commented 8 years ago

Looks like MixPanel offers a certain number of notifications for free. I'm not clear what the exact cap is nor what our needs will be at that point. Thank you! Tagging @joshbegley

JesseScott commented 8 years ago

I've recently started using UA for another project, and it's quite simple, but without seeing how you are managing the notifications through Parse (cloud code ??) it's hard to say what the best path forward...

peterphalen commented 8 years ago

Thanks man. I just created an account on UA to check it out. Looks decent. The parse stuff is currently handled by Josh, thank God. Incidentally, I went through the Guardian website's source code and found a json file with all the major details of each death: https://interactive.guim.co.uk/2015/the-counted/v/1455138961531/files/skeleton.json

I contacted their team and they tell me that link will be reliably maintained for the foreseeable future. It got me thinking about automating all the names and push notifications... I think I could write this integration relatively easily with respect to the two webviews, but do you know if it's feasible to automate the push notifications?

Thanks so much for your input. Much appreciated.

peterphalen commented 8 years ago

Please excuse any ignorance I'm revealing. I started teaching myself to code html5/css/javascript just a few weeks ago.

joshbegley commented 8 years ago

Hey Peter—yes, definitely feasible to automate. Parse is unfortunately shutting down, but they're open-sourcing much of the code used to power the Parse API. (Believe it's a Node/Express framework...) http://blog.parse.com/announcements/introducing-parse-server-and-the-database-migration-tool/

Totally open to UA if you guys think it's better; I just haven't had time to think much about the push workflow.

JesseScott commented 8 years ago

Josh, I guess the question is how do you consume the data from the Guardian and tell the Parse app to fire the notifications ? Is it Parse Cloud Code ? Cause if you want to replicate that, hosting a Parse Server on Heroku with a Node job is doable I think, but I'm not 100% sure how much of the Push API from Parse is going to live on - I know that existing Cloud Code integration modules - Mandril, Twilio, etc - are supposed to move to standard NPM packages...

peterphalen commented 8 years ago

Looks like Urban Airship is smart enough to fire automated pushes based on RSS or Atom feeds by checking them for updated content: http://docs.urbanairship.com/integration.html#rss-and-atom-feed-push

I don't currently know enough about Parse or Node to gauge how much work it would be to use that implementation...

peterphalen commented 8 years ago

@JesseScott Answering for Josh (correct me if I'm missing details). Currently the names are pulled the old-fashioned way: Josh gets them himself by cross-referencing sources like the Guardian and the Post and sends push notifications manually.

It would be pretty great to delegate this work to machines...

peterphalen commented 7 years ago

The app has been updated to use OneSignal for push notifications.