The ShadowTrackr iPhone app is live

It’s a very simple app. For the most part it’s just a webview with the website in it. The top part of the page is stripped and replaced with an iOS native searchbar. This gives a much better user experience than a html search bar. I’ve also stripped out the menu options and put these in a drop down menu to save some screen real estate. The more space is left for the actual content the better of course.

So why did I write a hybrid app instead of a native one or just a webapp? The main reason is notifications. I’ve been playing with this for a while and found it to be one of the most useful features of ShadowTrackr. I am eating my own dog food and am a daily user of ShadowTrackr. But I just don’t want to be looking at the timeline all day every day. I check it when I want to find information for a post mortem, to see what settings on what servers can be improved, or just to check in and see what’s happening.

When certain keywords appear on pastebin or in the news, I want to know immediately. The same goes for critical security changes. I want to know when a good SSL certificate goes bad, when one of my servers appears on a blacklist, or when my dns server suddenly allows zone transfers. The push notifications appear on my iPhone and I’ll decide if I want to check them out in detail in the app or just leave them. I'm often the first to know when something relevant happens online.

The security settings are hardcoded by me and the system will send a notification if I have set it for that particular event. You can’t change this yourself like you can for keywords. But it’s open for discussion and if several users sent me requests for different settings I’ll see what I can do.

One last thing to mention is that I really got annoyed by midnight notifications and I’m too lazy to switch them all off each night and on again each morning. So, I added the possibility to set the start and end time of your working day (under settings -> notifications). If set, notifications will only be send between specified times.

Here's the iOS app

And yes, there will be an Android app too :-)