Thank you, Twitter.

Just added a few minutes ago… as always, refresh your Twitter client list!

As of 1/6/2010, 2:00 AM CST we’re working with Facebook to determine the cause of the outage.  As additional details are made available to us, we’ll update here.

Resolved!

Support for the TwitBird family of iPhone clients is now available!  Just refresh your Twitter client list…

A few months back, the Fluttr team reached out to us here at Boxcar to find out what it would take for us to add support for their new Twitter client.  I’m pleased to announce that as of today, Boxcar supports Fluttr!  You’ll need to refresh your Twitter client list until the next release of Boxcar, at which point Fluttr will be included in the default client list.

After tons of fun over the last week with Apple, we’ve managed to finally get Boxcar 2.2 through to you!  Here’s a quick rundown of the new features:

• 5 new Christmas notification sounds (yay!)
• The ability to toggle hidden Facebook notifications on or off.
• The ability to toggle Twitter retweets on or off.
• The Inbox has been overhauled with touchable links and service icons.
• Twitter client list now includes TweetDeck, Natsulion by default.
• Improved Quiet Time user experience.
• Added the ability to push RSS or Atom feeds, in real time, thanks to the excellent Superfeedr service.
• Added the ability to push Growl notifications.

Oh, and did we mention the new icon and splash screens?  Big thanks to 24klogos for the fresh new look.  Let us know what you think about them here!

This is, quite simply, the best day I’ve had in awhile.

Can’t believe we won.  Awesome to see us up there with the other big names.

It’s easy to not talk about the changes happening behind the scenes. We’re pushing bug fixes, tweaks and other minor functionality changes to Boxcar all of the time. Here’s a quick rundown of a few recent updates:

New Email Server

We’ve gone through 3 different e-mail solutions now, and finally have one that will scale with us as necessary. The new e-mail backend is faster and has better support for UTF8 characters in ‘From’ addresses.

Trending Topic Alert Messages

At last! Prior to today we’d just push the sound and a badge update. Now you’ll see what’s actually trending, and when you Slide to Unlock, the search query will be pre-filled with the trending topic.

Better UTF8 Support for Notifications

We’ve always had a small issue affecting mainly our Japanese users, in that not all notifications were sent. This was because of multibyte characters, the length of our JSON payload to Apple (ugh!) and a host of other issues. Fortunately, that’s all been taken care of.

Twitter Search Polling: As often as we can

We try and limit how many searches we perform in an hour, at Twitter’s request, and we’ve always been very conservative with how often we perform searches. In some cases, that would cause significant delays. No fun. I’m pleased to say that we’re now checking search terms every 15 minutes for you. We’ll continue to work to reduce that time and have a few ideas in mind for making that happen.

New Twitter Client: Natsulion

Natsulion, an open source Twitter client for the iPhone was just added to our list of Twitter clients. Just refresh your list of Twitter clients inside of Boxcar, and Natsulion will be at the bottom! Not sure how to refresh the list of Twitter clients? Follow the instructions that we added for TweetDeck!

Facebook Notifications: No longer hidden

One of the changes we made last week around Facebook were to always send you any and all notifications, including read ones. Turns out there was one more kind to send: hidden notifications. Somehow, someway, some of our users found a way to hide notifications from the core Facebook applications like comments and status updates. We now truly send anything that Facebook gives us. Read, unread. Hidden or not hidden. If Facebook exposes it, we send it.

One more thing…

Last week we added an additional server to the cluster that may have been causing issues for those of you with both Twitter and Facebook services. Crap. We’re really sorry about that, but fortunately with the help of Josh Gard we were able to pinpoint the problem and fix it. For those of you receiving significant delays in pushes from one of either services (Twitter, Facebook), that should be resolved now.

From the time we first added in-app purchases, there has been a subset of jailbroken users that have never been able to purchase additional services.  After a ton of investigation, it was finally narrowed down to an application named AppSync causing the issue.

Further research showed that, at the time, the only way to fix it was to restore the device to a non-jailbroken state.  You could then either make your purchases, or re-jailbreak (without installing AppSync this time) and make your purchases.

Fortunately, we’ve found a fix that doesn’t require you to restore your device.  Just follow the steps in our latest Knowledge Base article: Can’t use in-app purchase: This is not a test user account.

80% of the maintenance that began almost two days ago is now complete, which means we are able to turn badges back on.  Yeah!

For those of you that had more than 20 old unread notifications, well, sorry.  Your badge just got reset to 20.

Trivia for you: One user had over 50,000 notifications.