Show HN: Hooks – Get Custom Notifications for Everything Important to You | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Hooks – Get Custom Notifications for Everything Important to You

gethooksapp.com

67 pointskrammer49 comments

The landing page doesn't tell me what this does at all. I get that it does alerts that somehow get onto the apple watch, but nothing else.

"Discover our channels" --> what are channels?

Ah ok after watching the video I get a much better idea of how to use the app. I'm curious to know how many people actually click on the video to watch it. IMHO good direct copy on the landing page is worth more than a video hidden behind a click.

You're totally right. Let's change it :)

Awesome I see you changed the copy :)

Can I suggest you change the headline to "Discover our alerts - subscribe and get notified on your Apple Watch!"?

We are thinking on removing the watch from that image as people may think its "just for watch" (whatever that means). What do you think?

FYI, there is a text version of our main alerts:

* Sports: NFL, MLB, NBA, NHL games and scores

* Music concerts

* Videogames releases, Twitch streams

* Weather: rain, ice, snow, temperature drop

* TV shows

* Lottery results

* Pollen, allergy alerts

* Meetups

* Films by rating, director or starring

* Top restaurants

* AMBER alerts

* Shipment tracking for every courier

* Website down

* Horoscope

* Earthquake

* Mentions of you or your brand

* Online courses

* Alexa rank

* Currency exchange rated including Bitcoin

* Stocks

* Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, Flickr, Youtube, Vimeo, Quora updates

* Reddit, ProductHunt, HackerNews top articles

This is really impressive. How did you secure the games and scores data?

Considering the wide range of possible triggers that don't have any kind of formal api I expect the answer is by scraping the right sites.

At least the NBA and NFL write out RSS feeds of games as they're playing with the scores and plays as they occur, to varying degrees of specificity.

They're kind of a bear to parse, but it's definitely doable without scraping, in some cases.

Hi, do you have a link to these feeds by any chance? Was hoping for something like this for a POC. Thanks!

The NFL game feed is a combination of a couple of feeds. There's

http://www.nfl.com/liveupdate/scorestrip -- which will show you the events and IDs that are currently going active. Right now, in the off-season, it will undoubtedly be blank. You can then take those values and plug them into this one:

http://www.nfl.com/liveupdate/game-center/%s/%s_gtd.json % (year, game_id)

For something to illustrate how they work together, you can check out this repository: https://github.com/BurntSushi/nflgame

I don't remember the one for the NBA, as I've never used it, but I saw an article on reddit a few weeks ago about how to get the data from the NBA using their RSS feed, so I have a good faith belief that it exists.

Thanks for sharing this! The only thing I had found was stuff like SportsXML, etc. but it took me weeks to just get a demo data dump for a single game and the pricing was way too much to bite off.

This is just what I needed to filter the signal from the noise. Please add Github tracking for repositories that receive more than X stars in one day: https://github.com/trending?since=daily (and variations on this theme). I will be a long time user. Keep up the great work and integrate more services!

When I edit an alert template in my inbox, it doesn't currently update the table cell (at least for me), but if I click on the alert, I can see from the title that it has been updated. Additionally, you may want to consider separating the templates from the notification/alerts in the view somehow.. possibly a different menu

You're right on the alert text updates. We will solve it asap. Also, as you said, we need to make more clear that notification-alert difference.

Thanks!

Great idea. We'll add it soon.

See if you can create a custom feed for the Github page using Feedity: https://feedity.com

For a "roll your own" approach I use Pushover on iOS (I know people using PushBullet on Android) and then either use the Email->Push gateway and/or I have a simple bash script "push" that I can pass a subject and message so that I can very easily setup shells scripts to send me push notifications when they finish (great for long running processes that you might run in screen). All the time in a screen I will do something like:

    cp /source/dir /target/dir && push "Moved" "Source Dir"

So that I'm not constantly checking screen or worse, forget about it and come back 1-2 days later.

I use ifttt + pushbullet for these kinds of tasks.

Pushbullet also has an api so you can directly push notifications to your device(s).

I wouldn't mind a clone of ifttt that let me customize my own channels.

The problem with these notification tools is that if something isn't already defined for you you're kind of sol. You can sort of hack it by making the thing-you-don't-have-a-channel-for output to a channel that is supported. E.g., if you want to be notified when your local library has a book in stock, you can get your library to email you, and then filter that in gmail, and have ifttt trigger on that email to pushbullet.

Kind of a hassle. #firstworldproblems

I've been using a huginn + pushbullet for this. It definitely lets you customize your channels (you can write your own in Ruby if you need full control).

https://github.com/cantino/huginn/

I've played with Huginn before but never got it fully set up. I even started working on my own clone of it written in node.js with the idea that from the web interface you would be able to tweak the JS for each "trigger" and "action" or at a least extend them. Maybe I need to play with my own idea again or just give Huginn another shot.

Awesome! Thanks for sharing, that looks really cool.

Any chance you could share this? I love pushover!

We had tons of scripts like that at our previous startup, most of them for marketing things.

If this is what I imagine this to be, you've saved me thousands of hours of development to make something I've wanted/needed for years.

Signed up, checking it out now.

I hope it is :)

It doesn't explain on the website, but how is this better than native notifications on iOS?

Hi! What we do is to provide a lot of alerts that you can configure and that you can handle in same place. For example, you can create an alert that will notify you when your site is down, or when there's a new meetup in your town, when a music band comes to your city...

Try to ask Siri for that ;).

What I'd really like to get are bank account and credit card activity alerts.

It's a great idea. We will try add them soon.

Do you know any nice API for that?

My credit card company allows me to configure email alerts. Kind of nice actually.

The up button at the bottom of the page leads to 404. http://gethooksapp.com/app_landing_new/#intro

Also your Press Kit is 404.

Thanks. I think it is solved now. We found the Presskit link was ok (its a dropbox folder). Anyway, if you need anything, just drop me a line at founders at gethooksapp.com

Is there a way to build completely custom alerts, ie something fired off by a script on the user's computer, through your app? If not, is there plans to add this functionality?

Basically, I have this project: https://github.com/CamHenlin/iMessageWebClient

And I would like to be able to add some type of push notifications to it, and I know I could package the front end as a cordova app to accomplish this, but I have serious doubts about such an app making it through App Store approval processes for obvious reasons, so a third party notification app sounds like an obvious next best choice.

Hi. Not right now. We have an rss alert where you can put any rss you want, but I know, that's not enough. We will add a way to that soon, probably creating a custom endpoint per user or even a email gateway.

Thanks for the reply, definitely looking forward to that feature being added!

[Disclaimer] I work at Semantics3.

We've been secretly working on a much more industrial-scale version of this, with a focus on getting price updates for eCommerce products.

Basically you can register a product URL, select the price change event that matters to you, and we'll push it to you via our Push Notifications API.

Its been in the works for a while, but we have MASSIVE scale. Our database is >60 million, and you can get price change push notifications on any of them.

Pretty useful if you're building your own shopping app and want the latest prices! It also helps, especially if you're trying to keep up with Amazon's pricing games.

Link: content.semantics3.com/webhooks-intro

Android? No?

Not yet :P. We hope to have it soon!

I use pushbullet http://pushbullet.com/ it's similar in it use of "channels" to notify you of something but doesn't have as many I think. It's also (from my experience) a little buggy

Since the app is free... privacy policy? I didn't find anything in your press kit or on your site.

Actually, we are using something standard (we didn't had much time for this, we'll make a custom one soon) http://gethooksapp.com/privacy_policy. You can see it at at apple store when going to download the app. BTW, we are using cloudkit for users log in so we dont know anything personal about you, but yeah, you're right, we have to improve that.

How are you getting at the netflix data? They killed their API for all but a few platforms in the fall.

What are the differences between this and IFTTT?

Great question. I love ifttt too. We are focused only in notifications and sending relevant data to the user. In our opinion, this has many advantages (in that context), being the most important that our interfaces are made thinking just on this problem so we can make it more usable and also that we can hand-curate every alert and add new ones faster. IFTTT is more about automation.

Awesome!

502. Nice.

Solved, thanks for the notice!

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