Notifications

[MattsShack]

Can an app "run in the background" and sent notifications? For example I am working on my first Boxee Box app (a weather alert application), but it seems to be lacking without the ability to send a notification even if the application is not open... Not a show stopper, just a large bummer.

Thank you!

[riegersn]

Yes and No ;p

Technically applications never close. Meaning, even if your in your weather app and hit back until you get to the app library, your weather app is still running.

The problem is that a user must first launch your app then close it to receive notifications.

How to handle notifications? You could use the jobmanager.

[bartsidee]

This is partially correct, for the boxee platform version at the moment the application indeed keeps running in the background (no way to auto start it on boot)

For the boxee box the application actually gets ended on closure by some security/sandbox mechanism. So you can not run anything in the background. I assume they did this to save some resources as the boxee box has limited hardware capabilities.

Note that threading can lead you into problems with the boxee box as you have to make sure you thread is closed/ended before you close the app. There is a bug in the boxee security mechanism which causes the box to stall completely if you have a running thread open while the sandbox is trying to kill the app. Unfortunately due to another bug it is very hard to actually tell you the user is closing the app and ending your thread nicely. See also the following related bug reports:
http://jira.boxee.tv/browse/BOXEE-10192
http://jira.boxee.tv/browse/BOXEE-10191
http://jira.boxee.tv/browse/BOXEE-10098
http://jira.boxee.tv/browse/BOXEE-10096