"Push" new SMS to open sessions? (not push notifications)

[jongpie]

First off, I apologize if some of my terminology isn't correct - I'm more of a frontend person, so some of the backend terminology throws me off. Basically, I'm wondering if I have VC open and I receive a new SMS, can VC automatically display the new SMS?

The best example of something like this that I can think of is Gmail. If I have Gmail open and receive a new email, it will automagically display in my inbox - I don't have to manually refresh to see it. I'm not sure if this is a "fetch" (my browser sends a check to Gmail every x amount of time) or if it's a push (Gmail sends it to any open sessions for my account - my guess is this is what is used), but it seems to be really quick.

Ideally, I would think that just refreshing the related SMS thread (if it's a reply) or just pulling in a new SMS thread would be better than refreshing all SMS and/or all other data (contacts, voicemails, etc. wouldn't need to also refresh).

My own desire for this (and maybe others as well) is that if I'm texting someone back and forth, I generally keep VC open (no sense in closing it since I'm expecting a response soon). But every time they send a message (which Prowl notifies me about), I have to then manually refresh ALL data (since there's no way to refresh just an individual tab or SMS thread). If VC could "push" the message to me, it would save me a lot of taps on the refresh button.

Is this feasible? My guess is that this might be a fairly big change, but I would love to see it implemented, if possible.

[joey]

I do see what your are saying jongpie and it would be nice to have a update like that but I wonder if the browser supports that. I heard WWDC will bring some new features one of them is suppose to be plugins. We shall see......I wish Safari would accept push notifications through a standard of some sort that would relieve many of our problems also

Questions for the DEVS

1. Can this be done?
2. I have not heard much about 4.0 and Safari but has anybody been beta testing the webapp in 4.0?

@jongpie also I was the one that requeted the Google Voice WebApp to be full screen a few months ago (aka websyndicate). Just thought I would tie those 2 together if you remember what im talking about.

[Chris]

This is feasible and I added a feature request to our tracking system for it. I'm not sure why it wasn't in there already as it seems so "natural." To be clear, there is no such thing as a "push" in HTTP since it uses a request-response model. What Google is likely doing in your Gmail example is fetching the data in the background and then updating the UI when there are changes.

[jongpie]

Hi Chris - glad to hear that this is feasible. Just curious - do you think this will make it into the next release (whenever that is), or will you need more time to implement/test it? Like I said before, i'm not sure how big of an ordeal this will be to implement.

And thanks for clarifying on the HTTP info!

[Chris]

I'm not sure that it will be part of the next release, but it would likely come in the following release. We will probably break the refresh/sync down into per-screen updating first (rather than fetching recents, SMS, billing, etc. every time).