It’s Fun Friday, and here at Boxcar, we’re highlighting our Quiet Time feature. :)

Some of our fans love us for the ability to pick specific sounds per service. Some like us for our fast push-notification. And some like us…for our quiet.

You might not have heard about it, but if you go into your general Boxcar settings (gear icon, upper-right-corner), you can pick a specific time range to daily have notifications go silent. It’s the top option in your settings list.

Want to sleep from 10 p.m. - 6 a.m. (8 hours? Who does that?!) and only be awakened by the buzz of your social world after that? Boxcar’s got you covered.

Choose your own times in increments of 15 min. and enjoy the convenience of Boxcar notifications available when you want them. We’ll stay quiet in meetings, classes, and sleep for you when you don’t. Enjoy your weekend!

Every once in a while, we like to mix things up around here a bit.

We’ve been busy with a lot of behind-the-scenes projects and some pretty neat third-party push work (check out the TechCrunch article if you hadn’t heard).

But we also get to talk to you, our awesome fans, quite a bit. You guys talk to us when you need help, you talk about us when you find a cool new service that integrates Boxcar, and you tell your friends about us too. And we heart that.

So we wanted to let you know. Personally.

Some of our followers on Twitter received snail mail (yep, it still exists - old-fashioned push notification) thank you’s last week.

For following us. For being Boxcar Brilliants. For being awesome.

And like the awesome fans they are (you too), they tweeted us back in reply and made our day.

Check it out:

Thanks for the awesome sticker @Boxcar! campl.us/iBUa

— Moses (@mosesdjr) April 5, 2012

                   

Ladies and gentlemen, THIS is how to do customer service. Thanks so much @boxcar team! Incredible! twitter.com/B_Puryear/stat…

— Blake Puryear (@B_Puryear) April 4, 2012

…and we’ve gotten more since. Thanks guys.

Love the pics, love your tweets, love the awesome. Enjoy your week!

We love the ingenuity our fans and providers display in their suggestions and the cool tools they build that incorporate Boxcar.

One very cool example of this is the work of Carl Brown (@CarlAllenBrown). His app, AppDropOTA, came out a couple months ago on the Apple Mac App Store.

Carl says his app allows developers to “drag-and-drop your .app bundle, and via Dropbox and the push notifications of Boxcar, you can have your App running on your device with just a couple of taps.”

Naturally, this is handy, since you can install your apps quickly without having to keep your phone plugged in to sync.

Check out the demo video below to see how Carl installs an app for testing on 9 devices in under two minutes using Boxcar push notifications and AppDropOTA.

Psst…we’ve got 5 Plug Spy promo codes to give away today!

To enter: Tweet us @boxcar with a comment and the #BoxcarBrilliant hashtag.

Deadline: 12 p.m. (noon) CST on Mar. 30th (tomorrow).

We’ll randomly pick five of the entries to win a code giving free access to Plug Spy, (available for $2.99 on the Apple Mac Store)!

If you want to learn more about Plug Spy and its integration with Boxcar, read our previous blog post about the app here.

Like we said then, this useful service is designed to give you instant warnings if someone tries to steal your MacBook or even enter a wrong password in the standard OS X login panel.

Good luck! Can’t wait to hear from you, our awesome #BoxcarBrilliant fans!

Update: Congratulations to @twbtwb, @Mo3Tah, @jack728, @mosesdjr, and @victorlgarcia - the winners of our recent Plug Spy giveaway!

Wanting a way to find out when anything on Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference webpage changes? Check out the newest Boxcar provider, courtesy of @atomicbird over at www.atomicbird.com!

            

Rumors suggest that dates might be June 11-15 this year, but the best way to know definite specifics is to get updates straight from the official webpage. :)

Note: Push notifications will be sent for *any* changes on the site. Happy waiting!

The latest Boxcar provider is out, thanks to creator icj_. Here are the key features:

• Will notify users of official iOS firmware only.
• Notifies once per firmware release to avoid spam.
• All the firmware releases are available to download here.

Get this useful new service and add it to your Boxcar here!

       

Are you a Sparrow fan, looking for push notifications? Look no further.

Not only was Sparrow for Mail just released over in the App Store…<cheers!>…

…BUT we’ve also added Sparrow as a new option in our apps list to open for your Boxcar Mail notification service. That means it’s super-easy, super-handy for you to get the notifications you need, connected with a great mail service that’s super-popular.

There’s a great article over on App Advice from Christine Chan, talking about the Sparrow service and its unique features, including a whole lot of great screenshots, called “Sparrow is the Best Email App for Your iPhone Since Apple’s Own.”

In case you’re interested, you can chat with the Sparrow team on Twitter at @sparrow, or read their latest blog updates on Tumblr.

Here’s a Sparrow how-to about adding Boxcar notifications. Have any questions for us? Just ask.

We hope you find this new mail option useful, and we look forward to hearing your feedback. Have a fantastic day, and happy emailing!

It’s the news you’ve been waiting for. We figured it out.

Facebook is now requiring additional permissions from you, our awesome Boxcar fans, in order for us to be able to deliver the push notifications you know and love.

SO.

Run, don’t walk, to our Boxcar website* (here’s a link so it’s handy) and…

DELETE that FB service you’ve been having trouble getting messages and updates from.

There. 

Feel better? We thought you might.

Now…re-install it. That means add the service again (and don’t cheat and just log out and back in to your FB account - that won’t work). Got that?

And after all that work (what…5 clicks?)…voilá…the sun will start shining, birds will start tweeting (no wait, that’s Twitter), and life will once again turn ON.

You’re welcome. You’re the bestest. And we’ll see you around. :)

*Note: Currently you do need to go to the website to make the change. We’ll add the additional authentication to our next update of the iOS app down the road.

Hey y’all!

Heads up: We’ll be in Austin, TX from March 9th through the 11th for SXSWi (SXSW Interactive) and we’d be thrilled to see you there. 

Want to meet-up with our founder and CEO, Jonathan George, to discuss Boxcar awesomeness? Shoot him an email (jonathan@boxcar.io) and come say hey!

We’ve been getting some questions in our help center about how to use Boxcar to send alerts for Twitter search results, so we put together this article to help.

First off, a quick warning about Twitter search results. Searching for generic terms can result in hundreds, if not thousands, of messages being sent to your phone. For those of you who love to watch your devices go berserk, it can be an exciting part of your day, but for the rest of you it’s probably more practical to focus on getting only the most actionable results. ;)

Here are some tips that should help you filter and find the search results you want.

** Comma-Separated & Boolean OR ** 

• #hashtag == Results will match anything with just #hashtag in it.
• Comma, separated, searches == results will match anything with “comma” or “separated” or “searches” in it.
• Comma separated, searches == results will match anything with “comma separated” or “searches” in it.
• Comma OR separated OR searches == results will match anything with Comma or Separated or Searches in it.
  

** Negations **

-racer == makes sure the search does NOT include the -racer word. If it does include it, we won’t push it.

Because Boxcar Racer is a post-hardcore music band, this one helps us find tweets relevant to tweets about the Boxcar App.

** From **

• “from:jdg” == will only send tweets that are tweeted by “jdg”
• from:jviney OR from:jdg OR from:conorh
  
  This one will send tweets matching jviney, jdg or conorh.

** Phrases **

“hello jdg” == Will only send a tweet that has “hello jdg” in it (exactly that phrase). NOTE: This is broken in the current iPhone version.  It messes up the quotes.

Don’t worry, if you start to get too many matches (60 search results sustained per minute) we’ll automatically disable the service. Turning it back on is as simple as re-saving it!

Oh, and by the way, we <3 you guys. Happy Valentine’s Day!