Filter/Whitelist for notifications/messages

[espruino-discuss2]

Posted at 2024-01-08 by Karsten

Hey there,

got my Bangle on Saturday and am loving it so far. Here's a picture to show where I'm coming from :D
I am printing a charging cradle right now as well.

The one thing I miss, though, is some kind of whitelisting for notifications/messages to get trough to the watch.

On the one hand I'd like to prevent some notifications from coming through (Song detection for example). On the other hand I'd like to prevent any notification from coming through in a set period of time - like 22:00-08:00. I could not find options or apps for both of this so far. Am I missing something?

I think about trying to get this in for me, not quite sure if this should be handled on gadgetbridge (I think not) or the watch. Opinions?

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Attachments:

• 6c4254b95b442c45.jpg

[espruino-discuss2]

Posted at 2024-01-09 by @gfwilliams

Glad you're enjoying it!

It is handled on the phone, so it depends if you have iPhone or Android - but looks like you're on Android.

For blocking notifications on Android with Gadgetbridge, you can do Settings -> Notification Settings -> Applications List however there is also a shortcut from the Bangle:

When you get a message, tap the button with the icon in it in the top right, then tap Ignore. This'll change the Gadgetbridge setting for you.

Music is handled differently (on Bangle.js). On the Bangle, go to Settings -> Apps -> Messages and ensure Auto open Music isn't set (this should be the default though).

If you are getting a music notification that actually auto-opens on the watch, it might be because of an actual notification from an app that's getting parsed - in which case you need to do the Ignore thing mentioned above.

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Posted at 2024-01-09 by Karsten

For blocking notifications on Android with Gadgetbridge, you can do Settings -> Notification Settings -> Applications List

This seems to not be the case. Notification settings only show "text as bitmaps", "size of text-bitmaps" and "rename special chars" or similar in English.

Am I in the wrong spot?

As for music: No, I meant the phone's song recognition, it's triggering a notification (was not aware of until now haha) and is displayed on the watch. But I can kill it with above solution, if I get where it is, ha!

Thanks for the quick response :) Glad all this seems to be handled already. Any idea/solution about the sleep time frame as well?

edit. aah, found it. It's a global setting for Gadget Bridge.

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Posted at 2024-01-09 by @gfwilliams

Notification settings only show "text as bitmaps"

That's when you press the gear icon on the Bangle.js card. Tap the 3 bars icon in the top left, then Notification Settings there.

Any idea/solution about the sleep time frame as well?

There's a qmsched app which allows you to put the Bangle into a 'quiet mode' at certain times of day - that should do it I think?

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Posted at 2024-01-09 by Karsten

There's a qmsched app which allows you to put the Bangle into a 'quiet mode' at certain times of day - that should do it I think?

yeah, Thanks! Kinda crazy that nearly all is available already :)

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Posted at 2024-01-09 by grandrew

Interestingly, this is exactly the REASON I bought Bangle.js smartwatch - to be able to do advanced filtering of notifications by "stopwords" and sorting them by "priority" by checking whitelist of words and using different styles of notifications - sounds, vibration, how much, etc.

I am literally right now writing some code in "messages" library to do this, so if you're interested - we can work together to make it a feature.

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Attachments:

• messages.js

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Posted at 2024-01-09 by Karsten

To be honest I'm impressed by the amount of customization in Gadget Bridge. There's even switch from white to black list and filtering words as you mentioned. Did not check this part of settings ind Gadget Bridge because I thought this is a device configuration and not globally for full Gadget Bridge.

Funnily enough my first intention was to do this on the watch, in the messages app, as you have already started, as well. To be quite honest: right now I'm not at all fluent in JS. I can read it and work with it but I cannot help much I guess. Need to check your edition anyway, though.
But why not push it to github as a fork already?

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Posted at 2024-01-10 by @gfwilliams

But why not push it to github as a fork already?

Yes - if you enable GitHub pages (https://www.espruino.com/Bangle.js+App+Loader) then anyone can install it and try if they go to your page.

The reason you might not want to filter on the watch is some apps tend to 'spam' the notifications - maybe they update the notification every second, and would end up sending notifications to the watch constantly. Ideally you want to be able to ignore those before they even get sent to the watch so they don't bog it down/drain your battery

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Posted at 2024-01-10 by grandrew

I am filtering on the watch because I need to specify reaction "level" on the watch by priority, not just throwing away message

1. I want prioritization to trigger different reactions - sound, high/low vib, etc.
2. For different "keywords" I want different pattern of notifications
3. I want to try experimenting with "speaking with vibration motor" - e.g. t,b, p - high-energy short pulse, a ,e, o - different low-energies with longer pulses.. to try to identify which keyword triggered the notification by "vibing (reading with vibration) out the word"
4. Maybe even trying to "vibe out" sender name if that was a person sending message
5. Maybe experimenting with "congestion control" if too many messages arrive per unit of time by dynamically increasing prioritization level

Publishing and packaging stuff takes more time that I'm ready to afford as of right now but I'll do in near future

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Posted at 2024-01-11 by @gfwilliams

That sounds great!

My point about filtering was just in response to @Karsten mentioning about watch filtering - there's no problem at all doing stuff on the watch (and the benefit is it works for iOS users too). It's just good to be able to block nuisance apps on the phone end too.

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Posted at 2024-01-11 by Karsten

That's what I was thinking about initially as well. But yeah, you are flooding the watch essentially. That's a downside.

Sounds great and well thoughtout already, @grandrew ! <3

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Posted at 2024-01-11 by grandrew

... and another high-priority feature: override whitelisting, that would fire notification alarm even if "do not disturb" and "quiet" are set on all devices.

Stopword-based whitelisting would also save me from searching for sub-menus that would probably? allow to do this on the "smart"phone GUI side.