Pushbullet is an awesome (and free) service to pass messages between your computer, phone and tablet. It offers immediacy which is perfect for alerting, and much more.

To use it, just register as a user to obtain an API key, and maybe install the Android or iPhone app. See the Pushbullet documentation for more, in particular

• Getting Started
• Features

The package is functional, yet still somewhat experimental and subject to change.

Initial explorations at the end of March 2014 were not entirely successful: Using RCurl, one could retrieve device lists, and push notes but would never retrieve the proper JSON response from Pushbullet. I consulted with some of the RCurl experts (shoutout to Jeff G, Hadley W, and Duncan TL) but without resolution.

So this is a simpler reboot. We simply call the curl binary, and retrieve the JSON response.

A file ~/.rpushbullet.json can be used to pass the API key and device identifiers to the package. The content is read upon package startup, and stored in a package-local environment. The format of this file is as follows:

{ 
    "key": "...placey your api key here...",

    "devices": [ 
        ".....device 1 id......",
        ".....device 2 id......",
        ".....device 3 id......"
    ],

    "names": [
        "...name1...",
        "...name2...",
        "...name3..."
    ]
}

The names field is optional and not (yet?) used. You can also use it programmatically via

cat(RJSONSIO::toJSON(list(key="..key here..", devices=c("..aa..", "..bb.."))))

and write that content to the file ~/.rpushbullet.json.

You can also retrieve the ids of your devices with the pbGetDevices() function by calling, say, str(fromJSON(pbGetDevices())). Note that you need to load one of the packages RJSONIO or rjson or jsonlite to access the fromJSON() function.

Dirk Eddelbuettel

GPL (>= 2)