UPDATE: It appears this app is no longer in the App Store. Reviewing the twitter feed shows that the app was submitted for review but perhaps never got approved. The only other app that might work for this would be the Boxcar app with the Uptime Robot turned on. However, for the amount of detail like instant notification of a particular “part” of a website being changed, has yet to be found. Although, if you live in Japan, iOS 5 has the option to give you Push Notifications for their Earthquake Early Warning System in place. (Which, can cause massive tsunami’s in certain areas)

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So one of the other iPhone app gems that I think doesn’t get enough publicity is the LetMeKnow app. (@pushnotifyme on Twitter)

This app is a real time saver and can come in real handy if you want to receive notifications of (almost) anything online. One great example to make use of it would be to configure it to watch NOAA’s Tsunami Watch website for any warnings you will need to know about. (@usoceangov on Twitter) First head over to the App Store and get this free app (as of this posting) by clicking here.

Once installed and opened, tap on the “Catalog” tab on the bottom. Next, tap the “Webpage” icon, and in the URL put in the correct NOAA Tsunami watch webpage for your region.

For West Coast & Alaska: http://wcatwc.arh.noaa.gov/

For Hawaii: http://www.scd.state.hi.us/

After inputting the site, make sure the following settings look like the snapshot above. “Look At” should be set to the “Part of Page”, and Sensitivity set to “At Least 1% Different”. For the Part of Page setting make sure you tap the area in which you want to continually “watch”. So for this example we will want to watch the banner that would change if there is a Tsunami warning. Tapping in that area will “highlight” it and your ready to go back to the Edit Subscription menu and tape “Save”. Example below:

(Side note: if you tap an area that LetMeKnow gives you an error from like a dynamic item on the page, simply select a larger region of that site to encapsulate the content you want to watch. I needed to do this and the snapshot above represents the area I needed to highlight in order for the app to recognize the item.)

After a few minutes from saving it, your LetMeKnow app will be ready to notify you the moment NOAA gives any sort of warning on its website! Let’s hope we never get any notifications from NOAA by using this app because we’ll know what that means, but if so at least you’ll be one of the first to know to get to higher ground.

There are plenty of other uses for this app, but I think this by far represents one of the coolest uses for it. At least, until the NOAA puts out an official iPhone app that does Push notifications for Tsunami and weather alerts.