As a weekend project, I created a service to monitor the status of many services (Github included) in one single page http://isserviceup.com/ . You can register with your Github account and star the services you use to receive notifications through Slack when their status change. It's all free and open source, let me know your thoughts!
Plex for iOS and Android is just a front end, you need the server-side of the software to convert video.
XBMC can convert video on-the-fly, to do this on iOS it uses private API for hardware acceleration (and that's why you need to jailbreak your device to install it)