I use Join mainly as a replacement for PushBullet on my Pixel 2XL, a Chromebook, a Win work desktop, and a Win10 home desktop. My home desktop is often turned off for up to six days a week, using it only on Saturdays. Scenario: Monday-Friday I'm on the bus commuting, reading news articles, etc... for 2 hrs/day. Depending on the article, I may send it to my Work Win10 desktop or my Home Win10 desktop to fully review later. My work desktop is turned off on the weekends. I usually push 1-3 articles to it on the weekend through Monday morning that I expect to see when I start the computer and log in. My home desktop is turned off all week, I expect to have anywhere from 3 to 15 new tabs automatically opened when I wake it from sleep on Saturday. What actually happens: Work: Most of the time I'll see those articles. Today (a Monday, so it was shutdown for the weekend), I received nothing, though I sent several from the bus. They're not in the Device Push History. Home: Usually I'll only get one or two new tabs when I wake the computer. Sometimes I disable/enable the Join Chrome extension and some more will suddenly show up. In short, I can't rely on seeing what I sent to another computer if the receiving computer wasn't turned on, awake, and online at the time. Further, I don't understand the "Check Device's Push History" action in Join. I expect everything I've sent to show up on that device's Push history. Instead, I only see the ones that were successful. The missing ones don't appear. I would expect that Join would write to the History file when it sends, not when it receives... now I end up trying to decide whether it's worth my time to wade through my browser history's 10,000 items to see which article I wanted to read later.
Thanks for the report. To clarify, this is happening with the Chrome extension? Can you faithfully reproduce it or does it seem kinda random?
Yes, from the Chrome extension on a Pixelbook. It's extremely random. Whenever I consciously test it, it seems to work fine. I've tried to reproduce it many times to give you a testcase, but it seems to work fine whenever I do. Another datapoint though: I send over 75% of my tabs from the bus which has spotty WiFi depending on where we are on the route. So it's possible that Join is simply failing to send the tab message, but not alerting me. Does the extension queue and retry on failure? What does "Check Device's Push History" actually do? Does it show me the currently selected device's attempted pushes? Or what that device received (in which case it's a bit of a misnomer and should be titled "Check Device's Receive History")?
Hi. Yes, it's actually received history, and not "sent-to" history, sorry. Maybe what's happening is that the device is not sending the tabs, that might be it... When that happens you should get a toast at the bottom informing you of it. Do you happen to notice something like that? Maybe I should make it retry again if it fails...
I don't ever see toasts when sending from Windows Chrome extension, only from Android. This morning I sent at least three tabs to my work Windows desktop from the bus - one of those from my phone which was on cellular data, the rest from my Pixelbook on bus WiFi. None arrived when I got to work an hour later and turned my computer on. Now I'm going to have to spend the next 30 minutes going through my tab history to see what it was I expected to see when I turned my work desktop on. Wouldn't it be better if the History file was written to when a tab was sent, so that we could at least see what it was that didn't arrive?
I meant toasts in the Android app, sorry. When you send a push and it's not able to push it should show a toast with that info... Does it show any toast when you try to send those pushes?
I push from my Android when I'm reading RSS feed blogs while standing in line, but once I'm on the bus, I switch to my Chromebook Pixelbook. I *think* most of my Android pushes get there... but the ones from the Chrome extension seem more flaky. This could be because my phone has better signal than the bus' WiFi provides my Pixelbook... Yes, it'd be great if the Chrome extension would (1) confirm that it sent, and (2) retry until it is successful. Also, it'd be great if the log were written upon attempt, not only upon success. That way we could at least see what we missed.
Ah, that's the issue then! Pushes from Chrome are not stored to open later. Only pushes from Android devices. Sorry for the confusion... What's probably happening is that Chrome
Oops, sorry! What's probably happening is that Chrome is storing those messages itself and that storage is not reliable, so you only get a few sometimes... The only sure fire way to get it right now is to push from an android device, sorry!
Ooof.... crap. Will you fix that, or do I need to go back to Pushbullet? (I really don't want to go to Pushbullet, but if I have to....)
I can try fixing it in a future update yes! I will have to implement a similar way of storing offline pushes as I do in the Android app. Sorry for the inconvenience.
That would be great. Actually, if you could just get it to give me an error popup when it fails, that would really instill confidence. That way I'll at least know that I need to retry or just email the URL to myself. Right now I have no idea if my tabs will be there when I expect them.
But the problem there is that it doesn't fail probably. It sends the push to Google's servers. Chrome is the one that sometimes has trouble getting those pushes from the server at startup
Hmmm.... the thing that led me to believe it was on the sending side is that I'm using my Pixelbook Chromebook on the buses' Wifi, which intermittently quietly disconnects as the bus moves between cell towers. I often have to reconnect to the bus WiFi even though it shows as connected because of this.
It definitely doesn't warn me. This morning I'm working from home. I used my Pixelbook to send a URL to my desktop in my home office. When I turned on (woke) my Windows computer 5 minutes later, it opened one that I'd sent early in the week, and never opened the one I'd just sent from the other room.
Well, I had to install Pushbullet again to regain my functionality. It would have been nice to use Join, but since I can't rely on it to work or at least warn me when it fails...