There’s another release note we have for you this February, which includes dozens of minor improvements and several brand new features:

New Rich Pages (latest SDK required):

You can send a deeply customized Rich Page built with our editor along with your push notification. Native Rich Pages allow you to create colorful flyers, banners and ads, and send it directly to your app with the push. The layout of the templates follows iOS and Android design guidelines, thus the result looks slightly different on these two platforms.

The Rich Page can be attached to the push in the Additional Data tab of the Send Push form, or passed as an integer value of the “rich_page_id” parameter in the /createMessage API request.

The current beta version includes a single basic template which you can customize. More templates that fit most common cases across different industries will be released soon, and your feedback on this is greatly appreciated. Please send us desired layouts of Rich Pages that you would like to see among our next templates, and we will take them into consideration!
And don’t you worry – old Rich HTML Pages are still working.

Geozones:

Timetable for Geozones is out of beta, and you can set the schedule of when your zones are working and when they are disabled. Besides, the map is now focusing on the location when you input coordinates manually.

Android Manifest Validator:

With our passion for automation, we have developed the Android Manifest Validator, which looks for permissions in your manifest file that are necessary to make Pushwoosh SDK work properly, and outputs the results as a list of errors you need to correct and warnings that you should consider if you are using advanced Pushwoosh functionality such as Geozones, iBeacons, etc.

Control Panel:

• API token management – label your tokens to be sure you are using the correct one;
• New billing management interface – it’s now easier to manage your existing subscription or create a new one;
• Android push customization – we’ve added LED color picker and Force Vibration that you can use for urgent push notifications (latest SDK required);
• Added Dynamic Content to other fields – now you can personalize not only the push message itself, but the Android/Amazon/BlackBerry headers as well
• Dozens of tiny yet important UI changes

We’ve also updated most of our SDKs on GitHub in February, so please update your applications with it as soon as you have a chance to be up-to-date and get the most of your push notifications.

More updates are coming in March, stay tuned!

As you know it is not possible to delete a push notification on iOS after it has been received on the device. However, you might have noticed that Facebook app can do that – you receive a push notification about a new message from a friend on your device, but it’s cleared automatically if you read it on your desktop without any interaction with an iOS app. How is this possible?

In this article we’d like to shed some light on how you can achieve the same and explain the method to make push notifications deletable.

The problem here is that iOS does not have an API method to delete push notification from the notification center. On the other hand it does provide a method to delete local notifications!

How push notification could be converted to local notification so it could be deleted later?

The key to this technique is to use a silent push notification that does not display any alert, and then to create a local notification based on the push notification payload.

The very first step is to add “Required background modes” into Info.plist file with the value “App downloads content in response to push notifications”.

Read more

There’s a brief yet important release note we’d like to share with you today.

SDKs:

Our Xamarin iOS plugin is now using the new Unified API, which means it has support for x64. We’ve also updated our Marmalade iOS extension with x64 support, both are now available on GitHub.
All other Pushwoosh iOS SDKs and plugins already support x64 architecture, so you are safe to submit your apps to Apple App Store.
Besides, during the last week we released updates for Native Android and iOS SDKs with various minor fixes and geolocation tracking improvements, and we strongly recommend updating your app with the latest version of Pushwoosh SDK.

Pushwoosh WordPress plugin is updated to version 2.3.11. Now the plugin supports custom post types, meaning that after you update the plugin you will be able to send pushes from any custom post you created in WordPress.

Control Panel:

We’ve added the long-awaited functionality to filter push notifications in the Push History based on the source of their creation. The other feature we’ve been asked for is the capability to export data from Push History.

Now you can export the list of push notifications in the CSV format for the chosen time period (1 day, 1 week, 2 weeks, 3 weeks & 1 month). The exported data currently includes:

• Message ID
• Date
• Push text
• Application or App Group
• Target Platforms
• Source (sent through API, CP, Geozone, etc.)

There is a limit on the number of pushes in the export – only most recent 100k pushes are included. We plan to add other metrics and data to this export in future.

Another minor enhancement was made to RSS Feeds – from now on the system assigns a unique ID to each RSS Feed you create in Pushwoosh. This ID is passed along with every push notification triggered from the feed as an integer value of "rss_id" key, for instance:
{"rss":"http:\/\/example.org\/newsfeed","rss_id":5678}

There are more features and enhancements to the service to be released early next week, stay tuned!

You may be aware that Qualys researchers have recently disclosed a GNU C Library vulnerability in some of the most stable and widespread distributions of Linux, now commonly known as Ghost vulnerability.

With this quick note we would like to assure you that we immediately reviewed all Pushwoosh services that may potentially be at risk, and our security engineers took all necessary steps to make the system 100% safe. All subsystems were fully available during this maintenance. We can confirm that Pushwoosh was not in any way affected by this vulnerability, and that we comply with industry data protection standards.

In our wide range of supported platforms Adobe AIR is one of the hottest. However, sometimes “hottest” means “high maintenance”, and recently we had received a number of complains about Adobe AIR apps crashing on startup. They had Pushwoosh SDK onboard and that appeared to be triggering difficulties.

After our own investigation it became clear that there are issues with extensions observed in the latest Adobe AIR SDK 16. We have informed our colleagues from Adobe, and there is also an ongoing communication on the forum board regarding this case:

https://forums.adobe.com/message/7094317

We all look forward to its resolution!