If you read yesterday’s post, I wrote about Safari’s new Push Notifications in Mavericks, and promised some news about a service that helps you use this feature while all those web sites toil to get it implemented. The name of the service is ProntoPush, and what it does is pretty simple. You create an account, add the RSS feeds of the sites you want notifications from, and next thing you know it you’ll be receiving updates from those sites in Notification Center.
It works pretty much like your standard news aggregator, except that it pushes site updates as notifications directly to your Mac. It’s a really nice work-around since there are only about five sites using this Safari feature right now. There are some shortcomings, although they are fairly minor. After all, the service is still in beta. First, notifications from all the sites you set up will appear to come from ProntoPush. That makes sense, but unlike the normal notifications, you can’t tell at a glance where they are coming from. The source shows up, and clicking on the notification takes you straight to the actual articles, but it is nicer to have separate sections for each site to which you are subscribed. Next, based on my experience so far, there seems to be a number of duplicate notifications. For example, from my TUAW subscription, I’m receiving two notifications for each article. I believe the same has been happening with MacWorld as well. Currently there is no way to tell if this is a problem with ProntoPush, or something originating from the sites themselves. Regardless, it’s still a really handy service, especially since I don’t use Notification Center on the Mac for much else anyway. So, until the other sites get on the bandwagon, give it a try.