CashNotify for Windows
The Stripe notifications app, now available for Windows!
For more than a year now, hundreds of users have enjoyed their Stripe notifications on their Macs.
And since about the same time, we were asked when Windows users could do the same thing.
Well, good news! CashNotify is now available for Windows as part of our Beta program.
(and to make it even better, you can now add your PayPal accounts, in addition to Stripe’s!)
FAQ
- Is it stable?
Mostly. The app should be fully usable, although we expect some minor bugs. We’ve been running a private beta for several months now. The goal of this public beta is to get feedback from as many people as possible, across various computing environments, to make sure it works as expected. - When will it really be stable?
We plan to release a stable version of CashNotify for Windows in a few weeks, hopefully this summer. Exact date will depend on the volume of comments we receive. - Is this beta free?
Yes, it is free to use as long as it’s in beta. Think of it as an extended trial version. Beta versions will stop working once a stable Windows version is available. This should give you a few weeks to test it for free. - I received a warning “Windows protected your PC” when running the installer. Is this normal?
Yes, this is expected. This is Windows’ SmartScreen telling you that the app does not have a valid certificate. You must click “Run anyway”. This warning will no longer be displayed once the app is properly signed, which will be done once we consider the app to be stable. - Which versions of Windows are supported?
We have successfully tested CashNotify with Windows 10, Windows 8.1 and Windows 7. Older versions of Windows are not supported. No, not even WinXP, and yes we know you love it. Sorry.
And for those interested in knowing what kind of work was involved, here are some details.
- Getting a functional Windows build is pretty straightforward, thanks to the great work done by the Electron Builder community.
- Our automatic update system was too old to run on Windows. We had to change it by a new one, which behaves rather differently than the previous one we used for the Mac builds. To simplify our codebase, we chose to use the same, upgraded auto-updater on macOS as well.
- The positionning of the window with macOS is simple: the menubar is always on top, and multiple displays are very well supported. One of the main issue with Electron applications on Windows is the poor implementation of positionning: it is quite difficult to correctly manage different tray positions, the overflow of the window’s bounds, and mutiple displays, all simultaneously. We have done a lot of tests, and the app should behave correctly in a bunch of different situations — even if we’re not sure we can cover 100% of the cases.
- The user interface has been slightly improved to be more readable on Windows. A new set of icons has been created specifically for Windows, because the size, DPI and background colors are different from those of macOS.
- There are other improvements we’d like to make in the coming months. One of them is that the font we originally chose — Lato — is slightly less readable on Windows. We did some tests with the system-ui fonts (Segoe UI for Windows, and San Fransisco for macOS), which we liked enough we’ll probably do it.
TL;DR:
Getting a functional and sexy Windows version of CashNotify has been harder and longer than expected. But we believe it is worth the effort, as it will let more online entrepreneurs to use CashNotify!
Give us a hand and try CashNotify for Windows today!
