Author Archive for Paul Stringer

Automatic SMS Web Backup for Android Phones Launched

Published
by
Paul Stringer
on March 9, 2009
in Development and News
. 0 Comments

The Treasuremytext Android App is now available on the Android Market (U.S. Only)

It took a little longer than expected but resulted in some significant changes to the app since we won the Developer Challenge based on a feedback from judges.

This is our first app which fulfills the request of many users which is for automatic backup of messages to Treasuremytext. We plan to roll this out to more smartphones in the future. This is where we see the future of Treasuremytext. Although SMS forwarding will always be an option, with more people taking up Smartphones we’re able to give people a much better experience through an app.

One thing we worked very hard on and are incredibly pleased with is the zero configuration authentication process we’ve implemented. It implements OAuth which is seen in our iPhone app but without need for passwords, logins and all that to’ing and fro’ing from site to app. This is still a pain on a mobile device and we think this is a much better way to do it. We’ll talk more about the actual implementation in a future post.

We’re trying to put together a quick video demo but in the meantime just go grab it and try it out, there are screenshots here.

We’re not sure how to link to the actual app in Market but just go to it on your Android phone and search for Treasuremytext in the Communication Apps section.

Treasuremytext wins in Android Developer Challenge

Published
by
Paul Stringer
on January 30, 2009
in Events and News
. 1 Comment

That's me bottom left in the Pink Shirt!

We won! Not the main prize that went to the fantastic Meter Maid app from Martin Koel en Alida Roskam (makes real easy the paying for parking around Amsterdam and other places I believe). Those two won a deserved return trip to San Francisco.

We though we’re thrilled to be win one of the other 4 prizes in a tough competition. Plus it’s fantastic to actually be able to get a G1 from T-Mobile as our prize. This will let us thoroughly test the Android app properly before releasing it on the Android Market.

It was a great event and lots of credit to Peter Robinett of Bubble Foundry for really starting the whole thing of with the excellent Mobile dev camps he’s been arranging here for the past few months in Amsterdam. We’ve been to a couple and there turning into some of the best meetups in town.

In the last few weeks we’ve become more and more excited about Android and starting to believe in it’s potential. We think it’s going to be a seriously big deal for Treasuremytext and a big part of our future. This is the first time we’ve been able to develop an app for a phone which we’ve dreamed about doing for a while now. It completes the Treasuremytext service, makes it seriously much easier to use and integrates seamlessly with your handset for the first time.

For all of those who’ve been asking about automatic backup to Treasuremytext with support for original dates and contact info, start looking at getting yourself an Android phone from T-Mobile as soon as you can.

We gave a small demo of the app which was recorded and will be placed up on T-Mobiles G1 site sometime today we’re told.

We’re finalists in the T-Mobile Android App Competition

Published
by
Paul Stringer
on January 28, 2009
in Development, Events and Uncategorized
. 0 Comments

On Thursday 29th T-Mobile are holding a press event for the launch of the G1 otherwise known as the Google or Android phone for the Netherlands.

After the recent Android Dev Camp in Amsterdam details of a competition for Android Apps was announced. The prizes range from G1 Phones to a trip to San Francisco.

After attending the event we got pretty excited about Android and realised we could build our dream Treasuremytext app on this phone. One which can automatically save your SMS in the cloud at Treasuremytext without you having to do anything.

We went back to the office and got to work and on Monday with 20 minutes to spare we submitted our Android app for the competition. Today we got a phone call and we’re amongst the 10 finalists and the winners are going to be announce tomorrow.

We’ll be there, we’ll let you know how we got on. Those of you with G1’s look out for Treasuremytext in the Android Market soon.

Here’s a bit of blurb from our submission which describes the app.

“Treasuremytext for Android

Treasuremytext for Android is a tiny background app that provides a seamless solution to archiving your messages on the Web from your T-Mobile G1.

Utilizing Android OS support for background services and deep integration with mobile SMS services the app is able to automatically forward each SMS as it is received. After setup it requires no action from the user. Messages can later be accessed on the Treasuremytext web site.

A Streamlined Mobile/Web Experience

The app communicates with Treasuremytext in the cloud using a REST based API. Many web services rely upon a token based authentication scheme (OAuth) including Treasuremytext.

This can prove cumbersome for the mobile user as it generally involves a round trip to the services website. With the access provided by Android to both Internet and SMS communications channels the developer has been able to implement the entire authorization between device and Web service with a single tap.

The users password is never required and accounts are setup automatically on the service if needed for access another time.“

Make the jump to 2.0

Published
by
Paul Stringer
on October 3, 2008
in Bugs, Development and iPhone
. 5 Comments

When releasing the new TMT for iPhone 2.0 app I made a couple of changes under the hood of our API. One of the things we did was to remove and clean up a couple of patches that were in there to accommodate a couple of bugs in the first TMT for iPhone app v1.0.

These bugs mostly arise around issues to do with & and = signs in messages. If you’re still using the old app you’ll have discovered messages containing these characters no longer save, anyone who gets a lot of messages with smilies in such as =) will notice this a lot.

To avoid confusion about what’s going on here we’ll be deprecating the API key for the v.1 app in the next few days. The app will try to reauthorise but you’ll be getting instead a nice message asking you to upgrade to 2.0.

So for original iPhone 2G with iPhone Software 1.* hold outs if there weren’t enough reasons already to get yourself to 2.0 this is just one more, don’t be scared now it’s real easy.

TMT for iPhone 2.0 Instructions

UPDATE Friday 17th October - Today we disabled the original iPhone 1.0 app.

Hi Bewaarbox

Published
by
Paul Stringer
on September 26, 2008
in News, SMS and Texting
. 0 Comments

Our Dutch speaking friend Alper tipped us of about Hi (a Netherlands MVNO) who are offering something very similar to Treasuremytext the Bewaarbox!.

We just checked them out and although similar in nature there are still plenty of things different about our services. One thing we do love is they let you print a tiny book of your messages. We’re looking to work with Moocards or someone similar to bring such a thing to Treausremytext because it’s really nice to be able to do that. The other big difference is they do MMS also but although we’re asked a lot about it we still prefer to concentrate on doing SMS and doing that as well as we can. MMS is such a different thing that it’s hard to make one thing that could do both really well.

Interestingly as an operator providing this, they don’t seem to be doing anything more magical than we are when it comes to the archiving process. When you want to save an SMS you send it to a number which is the model we’ve been using since we began which we think is the right one for most users. We tried to sign up, obviously to have a look around but couldn’t because it is tied to the Hi network (we’re with Vodafone). This makes sense because they can offer it as a nice service differentiator from the other networks. The downside is if you don’t happen to be with Hi you can’t use it. What happens if you ever switch networks is not obvious.

So if you’re not with Hi (or even if you are) Treasuremytext works just great in the Netherlands on any network and with a local Dutch 06 mobile number it’s probably going to be free with an inclusive SMS bundle for you to use!

If anyone is with Hi and has had a chance to play with it please share what it’s like and a couple of screen shots.

Official™ iPhone App - We’re working on it.

Published
by
Paul Stringer
on August 14, 2008
in News, Social SMS and iPhone
. 3 Comments

With our announcement of our official iPhone developer status (grandiose terms for “we can distribute on the App Store”), the launch of the App store and the 3G iPhone, some users of our unofficial™ Treasuremytext for iPhone app have wondering what’s taking us so long. “fbindc” recently commented:

“Hi! What’s the status of the treasure my text app? I’m dying to download this from the app store. Many iphone users are losing all there data, including text messages, with various 2.0.1 update bugs. Very frustrating, and your service would be really handy right now.” 

With that, we thought it was time to for an update to our iPhone users (including ourselves).

What’s happening with Treasuremytext for iPhone 2.0?

Treasuremytext for iPhone development is underway; and with an official SDK and some documentation this time round this ones a big upgrade over the original. Things we’re looking to do with the new app: archiving entire conversations (a big request), a much improved interface for sorting through your SMS via your Contacts, some location awareness which attaches that metadata to your messages.  We’ll also be experimenting with the accelorometer to measure how fast you’re travelling at the time you archive and then work out if you were out walking, in a car, train, aeroplane etc and add that meta data to your archived message. Forget that last thing; stupid idea, but you get the idea - the iPhone is an incredible platform, we love it and we plan to be there as soon as possible.

(If you’re sat in a train, can your iPhone tell how fast you’re traveling? I didn’t pay attention in Physics classes; my guess is it can’t. For one, it would play havoc with super monkey ball but the accelerometer, I think only detects changes to motion; not motion itself?? I digress…)

Making the new app is going to take a little bit of work and we’re fitting it in around everything else we’re doing here. Apart from this, as of writing, there is still missing support in the SDK which means we can’t complete our app’s development. In a perfectly sensible move by Apple, all 3rd party applications are sandboxed so they live and make as much mess as they like in their own space on your phone. If they screw up they only screw themselves up. This protects the iPhone and you from rogue apps trampling all over your iPhone’s file system turning it into something resembling a Windows Mobile device or doing things it shouldn’t be - making phone calls to premium rate sex lines that kind of thing.

iPhone 101 and how our apps get your stuff

To control how an app goes about it’s business and to give it deeper integration with the data on the phone there are APIs provided by Apple that give our apps access to its data. Right now there is one for the iPhone’s Address book and Photos but as far as stuff on your phone goes that’s it. There’s nothing yet to access any of the other data stored on your iPhone such as Call logs, Email, Calendars, Music, Videos or SMS. We don’t have any privileged information so we don’t know when / if these features will be added but we remain hopeful and optimistic that they will and allowing us to release this through the App store.

An iPhone at the heart of your social graph

Providing access to this personal data seems to be a natural evolution of the SDK and will make possible a new kind of App and we think spur a new wave of development for the iPhone. This personal data is really what your phone is all about and our optimism is based on the fact we’re pretty sure we’re not the only developers who can think of things to do with this data and who are crying out for it.

Your (i)Phone knows a lot about you, who you call, who last called you, who you’re meeting with at lunch, who you SMS, where you are, where other people are, who you are. Beyond just some cool utility apps you could build for managing & handling this data, syncing it online (boring) there is something insanely more interesting that would happen when you get this data out of the confines of the phone handset and hook it into online spaces, specifically adding a new dimension to your web based social activities. The phone despite being your single most important means of communicating/socialising in the real world still doesn’t get that involved in your socializing activities in the online one. It’s a no brainer that in the future this is going to change and the iPhone and phones in general will start to meld and integrate more with your web based activities blurring what happens in the real world with what happens in the online one. Developers such as Loopt and Facebook I’m sure are salivating at the idea of being able to leverage the social graph information stored within your phone to combine it with their own.

Sounds like some scary shit

To some folks (we’ve been listening to too much Obama to start saying ‘folks’) this will sound scary, and rightly so, what apps are you going to allow to get at this stuff? Of course with the Treasuremytext app its motives are clear and we’re an incredibly trustworthy bunch! But should all apps be granted access wily nily to what you have on your phone?  There are issues regards privacy and maybe it is a mitigating factor in why we haven’t seen such access in the SDK yet. Should all Apps automatically get access to all your personal data or should extra permissions need to be granted by the user to the app? That sounds un-Apple, creating different classes of application that during install the user must give explicit permission to gain special priveliges, that’s just yuck. Then again maybe none of this is nescessary, Apple vet our apps anyway, have the power to pull them of the shelf and even it seems potentially remotely disable them so maybe there’s enough safe guards inherent in the system as is.

Our get out out of Jail free card

This is all well and good but for now this doesn’t help people archive their SMS with Treasuremytext. To get things moving along we’re going to take some time out of the new apps development to tweak our current iPhone app so it will work on Jailbroken iPhone 2.0 phones both 2 and 3G. This shouldn’t take too long and we hope to have it available soon.

We’ll be continuing work on the new version and get it ready to go as soon as the SDK allows. There is always the option of releasing it as a jailbroken version but for now we will wait to see what unfolds with the official SDK.

Sneakpeek / Setting the original date of your SMS

Published
by
Paul Stringer
on April 11, 2008
in Design and Features
. 0 Comments

Probably the most requested feature is the ability to save the original date of your SMS. It’s impossible for us to do from the forwarded SMS so instead people have been diligently using sticky notes and even appending the original date and time to the messages saved. We’re wondering if this is people doing it themselves or if there are actually some phones out there that are doing this for them

So implementing a feature to allow people to change the date has been on the todo list for a while and it’s finally coming into existence. Here’s a sneak peak of whats coming. The UI comes from the JQuery datepicker extended with a timepicker with a few special modifications.

We’re Twittering…

Published
by
Paul Stringer
on April 7, 2008
in Social SMS
. 0 Comments

Treasuremytext Twitter PageYou can follow the inane minutia of whats going on here if your into this over at Twitter / Treasuremytext. We going to put status updates about ongoing tweaks, fixes, outage notifications, new features that kind of thing.

Every day we’re doing many of these types of little changes but not always something that warrants a big announcement on here or a Press Release and so Twitter fills that gap nicely.

This is an extension of what we started with using using Get Satisfaction. Being able to to communicate with our users quickly and hearing about their problems and questions has been incredibly useful and now guides most of our current efforts. With Twitter we hope to go a little further and to hope get to know some of users a little better through it.

We’re are a fresh Twitter virgin and only have just one follower right now (probably ourselves) so go add us and make us feel warm and fuzzy, we’ll add you right back.

Are they ignoring me, know for sure with delivery reciepts.

Published
by
Paul Stringer
on April 2, 2008
in Features and Texting
. 0 Comments

SMS Delivery StatusIt bothers me when sending someone an SMS when I’m expecting a reply when I don’t get one.

My natural predispostion is to imagine something has gone wrong with the SMS being delivered rather than just imagining that my message wasn’t the most important thing to someone at that particular moment in time. This problem is doubly excerbated when using the Web to send an SMS because it adds to your irrational thinkings, ‘Maybe the Website didn’t send it’. We know you think this from the number of people we see sending SMS to themselves the first time they try it from Treasuremytext - there’s something about a Website sending SMS that people don’t quite believe is true.

With this in mind the new TMT introduced support for SMS delivery reciepts, something that wasn’t there in the old site. This was broken after launch but as of yesterday was back again and it’s pretty cool.

Built into SMS technology is a notification system which immediatly tells the phone or gateway of the sender the status of the SMS sent which is updated again when an SMS has been delivered or it’s given up trying. It’s probably even supported on your phone, buried deep in a menu somewhere. The ability to check the delivery status of a message, I think the venerable Nokia 3310 was able to do this. Treasuremytext also does this, it’s not quite buried deep in a menu but it may be just as unnoticed unless you look for it.

So if you want to be sure someone is getting your SMS you can feel a bit more reassured if you send it from Treasuremytext. Aswell as delivery status notifications it’s also much easier to type on a keyboard, did we mention it comes from your own number so people can reply straight back, and it’s just 0.05 euro cents anywhere in the world, payable by PayPal, what a bargain, you really should check it out!

So if you’re using our outbound sms check out your Sent folder and take a look at the delivery status of any of your sent messages. In there each message is displayed with either a green, yellow or red light. Green = Your SMS has been delivered, Yellow = It’s enroute and it’s delayed either because of the network or more normally because the persons phone is off and finally Red = It can’t be delivered (normally because the number isn’t the full international number).

If you catch it quick enough between going from Yellow to Green after sending it you might even see it change in front of your eyes and it making a cute little sound to tell you it’s been delivered.

Sorry about the emails and SMS

Published
by
Paul Stringer
on March 17, 2008
in Beta and Bugs
. 0 Comments

We had a bit of an error this morning whilst testing something that resulted in the site sending lots of email/sms messages to everyone subscribed to my TextStream. Sincere apologies if you were one of the recipients. Preventative measures are being taken to stop it happening again, but enough excuses because it shouldn’t have happened in the first place.