Phone Notifications

[tnorling]

So I had a few issues with this module that I think I was able to fix. The first issue I had was that the second notification gets posted several times. Second, when a notification from an app is already on the list, if a new notification from that app comes in it does not update or push it to the top. Finally, the top of the list is the oldest notification, not the newest. I came up with a solution that seems to work for me so far.

In the phone_notification.js file update the cleanPayload function to look like this

cleanPayload: function(newPayload){
        var application_name = newPayload.application_name;
        var that = this;
        var dupIndex = 0;
        if(this.payload.length > 0)
        {
            this.payload.forEach(function (m) {
                // If application_name already exists, increment notification count
                if(m.application_name === application_name)
                {
                    m.count++;
                    that.payload.splice(dupIndex,1);
                }
                dupIndex++;
            });
        }
        
        this.payload.unshift(newPayload);
        this.payload.slice(0, this.config.displayCount -1);
    },

Let me know if this helps or if you have any issues with it.

[SypherDaemon]

@tnorling Hello there! I had almost given up hope on anyone turning up to help. Thanks so much. But just to follow-up I´ve replaced the CleanPayload function with yours and it seems to only allow one notification to appear, while ignoring others. The notification count also does not seem to increase despite giving myself missed calls. Thanks once again. Perhaps there are other segments that you have edited to make this work?

[tnorling]

@SypherDaemon Interesting…what did you set your numberOfNotifications to in the config file? I have mine set to 3 and I am indeed showing 3 notifications at a time. I also just finished writing a function to remove notifications once they’ve been swiped away from your phone. Maybe I changed something somewhere else as well that made it all work. I’ll post my current working code shortly for you to test out.

Edit: The count may no longer work because I am now replacing notifications coming from the same app. I’ll see what I can do to fix that next…

[SypherDaemon]

@tnorling It’s fully working now, it was a mistake on my part. And yes I fully understand why the notification count isn’t increasing now, I was just using it to debug and see if the program was still accepting multiple notifications. Not really a loss from my end, as I’m not planning on using the notification count. But again, thank you so much. I’m gonna keep testing it out to see if there aren’t any unforseen side-effects.

[tnorling]

@SypherDaemon No problem! I’ve been wanting to use this for my own project so I’ve been trying to fix the issues I see with it. Most of the work was done by others, they deserve the credit on this one. I forked the original repo and uploaded my work if you’d like the dismissal feature as well.

Link is Here

[SypherDaemon]

@tnorling I’m doing the same over on this side. I will definitely check it out. Good luck in your project!

Edit: It turns out the problem earlier with the m.count++ was my own doing, my own mistake. Haha.

[ronny3050]

@tnorling excellent work! Glad you could figure it out.

Once you’re good to go, would you mind submitting a pull request?

[tnorling]

@ronny3050 I submitted a pull request. A couple things to note: the notification count no longer works. In order to make it work it would need to increment on a notification being posted and decrement on dismissal. However, the dismissal information does not contain a field that differentiates between 2 notifications from the same application. So that means when a dismissal gets triggered on an app that has 2 or more active notifications it would remove all the notifications from that app making the count a useless number. This also means that when any notification from an app gets dismissed, even if it’s not the most recent, the notification from that app shown on the mirror get dismissed. I’ll look into this a little further but from what I’ve seen so far there doesn’t seem to be a way around it.

The second issue I’ve been running into is that there seems to be a server request error when notifications come in or get dismissed too quickly. It happens quietly in the background but if you find your phone blowing up with notifications, they may stop appearing on the mirror. We may need to incorporate a short waiting period between requests so it doesn’t lock up and miss incoming notifications.

Edit: I did actually figure out how to differentiate between notifications from the same app. I was just not paying close enough attention to the API haha. I guess the question now is whether or not the count is necessary since each notification would presumably have its own unique content. I can think of a way to do it if it’s a feature people want, but for my purposes it seems fine without.

[ronny3050]

@tnorling I believe there is an ID associated with each notification that can help discriminate between two notifications from the same application.

For the second issue, I like the idea of a short waiting period. Another idea might be, albeit more complicated, is to have a notificationTimePeriod, say 45 seconds. If N notifications show up within 45 seconds, we will display the first notification in the notification area in the mirror, and slide subsequent ones with a delayNextNotification time period. That is, in the mirror, we will only use one item in the notification list to display all N notifications within a 45 second time period by sliding each of them with a delay.

Please let me know how this sounds. Thanks!

Edit: Sorry! Saw your edit late :b

[tnorling]

@ronny3050 It seems to be related to requesting the information from Pushbullet rather than displaying it onto the mirror so I’m not sure changing the rate at which we display them will solve the issue. There seem to be some limitations on how often you can use their API with a free account. I also noticed that some notifications, such as incoming phone calls, show up on the JSON stream as repeated pushes instead of just one. This would result in several requests back to back for the same notification and could be contributing to the problem. I’m not sure if this is a solveable problem though as it’s on their end. At first I thought we could check to see if the incoming notification is already on the list and do nothing if it is, but at that point the request has already been made.

After some thought, a wait period might not work either. Say you have a push, push, dismiss, push in quick succession. With a wait period in between requests the mirror may skip the second push if the dismiss happens before the wait period is over and you may see something like push, dismiss, push on the mirror. I’m not too familiar with the way the JSON file comes in. If you get the whole file each time a new event happens, a wait period could work. But if you only get the new event we’ll have some issues.

Of course getting a paid Pushbullet account would probably solve this issue without needing to rework the code, but who wants to pay? :P

Thoughts or other ideas?