ProcessOne Acquiring Boxcar, Bringing Free Push Notifications To Twittelator Neue

Push services are a hot commodity these days. Everything from site trackers to email to social networking apps truly come alive with real-time, up to the minute push alerts. For providers of these apps and services, however, keeping push servers in house can be quite costly. Smaller businesses just can’t scale as they’re needed and/or afford the type of scale they really need. Third party services such as Boxcar allow developers from any company to tap into their push service network and provide push services without doing all the heavy lifting themselves.

On that note, there’s some big news today in the push world. ProcessOne, the company behind the simple yet awesome PushMail app that brought push notifications to Sparrow for iOS (and that we reviewed last year) is acquiring Boxcar from Kwaga (hit app: WriteThatName).

20130212-092525.jpgAs part of the sale, Boxcar’s entire IP, all mobile apps, misc. technologies and brand will be integrated into and underneath ProcessOne, and in the process, merge Boxcar and ProcessOne’s Push Mail app into one. And on that note, ProcessOne’s Arnaud Le Ruyet says that the company is planning to bring an all new Boxcar app to the App Store complete with support for the iPhone 5/iOS 6, though no firm timeline has been pinpointed just yet. Current Boxcar app users need not worry. The app that is already available in the App Store will continue to be available and operate as it always has.

Alongside the big acquisition between ProcessOne and Kwaga regarding Boxcar, their’s some other big (read: also good) news for fans of the iOS Twitter app, Twittelator Neue. Stone Design and ProcessOne are embarking on an agreement that will see real-time push notifications returning to Twittelator Neue – for free. All new users of Twittelator Neue will receive the free push service once they install the new Twittelator Neue 2.5 (coming soon – waiting for Apple approval – App Store Link).

Besides revamped push, Twittelator Neue 2.5 features a tweaked, all-new tweet detail design as well as tweet media that is fully displayed within each tweet. Animations have also been given some TLC to make them more fluid and less laggy. Global Twitter search, autocomplete, instant account switching, additional font choices, support for iOS 5/6 Twitter accounts (configured in Settings.app), saved Twitter searches, regional trends and tweet replies are some of the many areas of Twittelator Neue that have been updated in version 2.5.
The features mentioned about actually launched in previous versions and not 2.5 – 2.5 is all about push.

We first saw Twittelator Neue way back in October 2011 and fell in love with its unique UI that (at the time) was one of very few apps to give Tweetbot a run for the money. The premium level ($$) push feature for Twittelator Neue was powered by Boxcar and great at first, but quickly became unreliable. Worse still, many days to weeks at a time would see completely unusable push as issues between Twittelator Neue and Boxcar lingered. These days, Twittelator Neue has fallen out of the spotlight to newcomers like Flurry and Twitteriffic 5 (and soon Tweebie), as well as a heavily revamped stock Twitter app and of course Tweetbot. But with ProcessOne’s rock solid track record with PushMail app for Sparrow over the last year, Twittelator Neue could be set for a come back, or at the very least, become usable for push lovers once again.

In the grander scheme of things, ProcessOne is set to become a dominating force in the world of push services and not just for email. As you can see in any search the App Store, push services aren’t just for email anymore. There are a ton of ways to use push, and ProcessOne is poised to take it over in one fell swoop.