Plugin for external notifications or add as feature to swift itself

[KWB]

I have developed a plugin for vPilot that relays incoming messages to external services. The two most frequently used services are Pushover and Hoppie.

Pushover support allows notifications to be sent to devices such as smart phones and tablets to alert when somebody is trying to reach you. This is primarily useful when you have momentarily stepped away while out of coverage area and a controller suddenly comes online asking you to check in with them. This way you know to get back to your computer sooner than later without having to disconnect form Vatsim altogether.

Sending to Hoppie has benefits such as the message will then show up in your FMC/FMGC type systems as well which means you don't need to switch to a different program window to read a "contact me" message and get it inside your FM(G)C instead.

Maybe Swift can already do these types of things. I wasn't able to find information on it with cursory searches. Users of the my vPilot plugin have asked if I could add Swift support as well. I thought I would start out by submitting a feature request here and see if this is something that can be done either by you guys to make it an integrated feature or by way of a plugin I can write to extend functionality similar to how I did that with vPilot.

[KWB]

Hoppie works the same way. You send a HTTP GET or HTTP POST request (either is fine) with parameters. It's documented here: http://www.hoppie.nl/acars/system/tech.html

The "from" parameter should always be your own callsign (the one you're currently signed into Hoppie with which is the same callsign most likely you're signed into VATSIM with). When relaying somebody else's message to Hoppie on behalf of yourself, you might be tempted to use the callsign of the actual sender, ie. an ATC controller. The problem lies in that those people themselves might also be connected to Hoppie for their own purposes and thus you get into a situation where you try to impersonate somebody that is online.

I have discussed this with the Hoppie developer and the best solution (for now) is to simply set "from" and "to" to be your own callsign to avoid conflicts. For the messages to read less awkward I send messages to Hoppie such as this:

vPilot Message Relay: ATL_CTR Message from ATL Centre here

vPilot Message Relay: DAL1234 Message from pilot DAL1234 here

And seeing we're discussing features. I've constructed the code to provide some flexibility in the types of messages that are being relayed. Sometimes the desire is to relay everything, even messages not actually meant for you (such as communication to other pilots and controllers) but when UNICOM chatter gets too much I often configure it to only relay messages that include my own callsign so I my phone doesn't constantly notify me with things that don't actually concern me. Similarly, private messages can be relayed or set it to only relay "contact me" type messages from ATC.