March 6th, 2015 — pbor

You are sitting in front of the PC busy coding the next great GNOME application or more likely watching funny cat pictures and you hear your cat purr… oh wait, you do not have a cat, so you figure out it is your phone vibrating so you start looking for it among all the mess that’s on your desk. When you finally find it you can read the Whatsapp message or SMS you just received and now you would like to reply sending that funny cat picture you had open in the browser on your PC…

Despair no more, the lobster is here to help you! Nacho, Kurt and I started a new side project called Nuntius which lets you read notifications from your android phone directly on your beautiful GNOME desktop. This is going to be even better with GNOME 3.16 and its redesigned notification system.

Both the android application and the GNOME application are free software and are available on github, but the simplest way to try it is to install the android application from the Google Play Store, while the linux application is already available in Fedora and packaging for any other distribution is more than welcome.

Nuntius uses bluetooth to communicate, this is not only a technological choice, but also a design one: notifications will be sent to the PC only when you are nearby and your messages stay local and private and will not be sent to “teh cloud”.

In the best tradition of free software, this is a very early release with just the bare minimum functionality (for instance replying directly to a message from a GNOME notification is not implemented yet) and we welcome any feedback and help.