What we’re up to at Treasuremytext
Did you updgrade to 1.1.3 Firmware and the Treasuremytext.app was broken? It’s just been fixed with version 0.6-r2 compatible with 1.1.3 Firmware iPhones - thanks Mike!
After you’ve finished jiggling your icons about head over to installer.app, head for sources and hit refresh. TMT for iPhone should appear in updates.
We’re currently installing our U.S. service but not being U.S. citizens it makes it a little difficult for us to check compatibility with all the networks. We need a couple of people to test out the four major networks in the U.S. and Canada. The test only requires you to create a Treasuremytext account and to send an SMS to a standard U.S. mobile number so we can verify it is working on that network. We need people on these following networks :
Can you help? If you want to help us beta test this then send us an email to beta(at)treasuremytext(dot)com (replacing commars and ‘at’s where appropriate - you know what we mean)!
We’ll then send you a special invite to sign up with other relevant instructions.
If you’re using the iPhone app check your Installer.app for a new Treasuremytext for iPhone update. It fixes the issue with the authentication notice appearing after saving messages and some minor changes which should make the whole experience a little smoother.
Are their any features your want to see or finding any bugs then let us know at Getsatisfaction
Whilst testing out a user registration today we inadvertently discovered a cool feature for people in the UK. You can send text messages to regular BT landlines in the UK from Treasuremytext (or any mobile for that matter). After sending a message it works like this. The phone begins to ring and you get the message that was sent read out by a rather good sounding artificial posh English woman. Unfortunately BT Text doesn’t have the ability to forward messages so you can’t then save them with us. They also destroy your messages after 24 hours so it might have been nice. If there was a forward option though it may have proved a little tricky to figure out how to actually send it too the cryptically interpreted Plus 31 billion, 621 million 224 thousand 500 and 80. (If you’re wondering what that is, it’s our phone number, - +31621224580 but the BT message lady converts it to a very big number indeed!) It sounds more like a statistical probability number from the HitchHikers Guide than a phone number.
So now the first tentative round of invites and testing is pretty much done. There haven’t been any major issues but a whole bunch of tiny things that cropped up have been fixed or improved. Getting the small things right is very important and many thanks to everyone who’s helped so far and given us ideas and feedback.
We’ve been fairly cautious in the number of invites we’ve given out but now we need to let a few more people in to really give this thing a proper work out. So to make this easy you can now get an account for the beta without having to wait for an invite, here’s how.
Oh and one other thing is that you can now also tell which contacts are also your favorites by a heart that appears over a contacts buddy icon. So cute, one of Katies ideas of course.
Look forward to seeing you all in there, don’t forget to check out my Backroom TextStream and sign me up as a favourite already!
As big iPhone fans and users we’ve been having a major problem these last couple of weeks. Apple with the iPhone forgot, didn’t get round to, or in zen like quest for simplicity decided to provide only the most basic SMS functionality to facilitate its iChat like SMS interface.
If you didn’t know already this is a bit of a problem for Treasuremytext as it uses SMS forwarding as the means by which messages are saved. It’s a simple mechanism which won’t flummox mobile users and only requires the most basic functionality for a phone to be compatible. This meant probably every phone ever made worked with our service before that is the arrival of the most advanced phone on the planet.
Today though we we’re excited to discover that the latest version of SMSD for the iPhone now includes forwarding. We stumbled across the latest version of it available here or more easily via Installer.app. This will require a Jailbroken iPhone which if you haven’t done so yet you need to do so, they’re are useful guides how to over at www.modmyifone.com.
Originally when we came across this utility it only provided functionality to delete messages but the latest update provides forwarding functionality and it’s pretty nicely done too. In terms of future iPhone support we have plans which will totally remove the need for forwarding altogether and we’re eagerly waiting to get a look at the iPhone SDK but stay tuned for that.
In the meantime if you’ve got an iPhone you can now use Treasuremytext again and set free your SMS from their ‘child like’ iPhone iChat bubble prisons. Need an invite? just drop by beta.treasuremytext.com and leave us your email.
The last time I had to make a favourites icon with it being a windows .ico file and me being on a Mac meant an afternoon of trying to find instructions about how to do it & then tracking down oddball plugins for Photoshop to do the task.
Today a 0.13456 Millisecond search on google for ‘How to make Favourites Icon’ yielded HTML Kit. 30 Seconds later I had my new heart shaped Favicon which should now be displaying in your browser if you visit the beta.
It includes an option to make an animated scrolling one just for some late 90’s web throwback feel. I resisted as I think we’ve already gone to far with our under construction animated gif
It’s only a small thing but it keeps underlining how much the Web has shifted in just a few short years from being mostly a resource of hyperlinked documents to being a place of services and applications. A few years ago it gave me instructions on how to make a favourites icon, now it gives me the actual service to accomplish the task, web you’ve come a long way!
Future of Web Apps is underway in London between 3-5 October. Katie will be there with demos of TMT2, invites to our beta and a box of iHeartSms stickers. Get in touch if your attending and think there may be some synergies in the air or simply would like another sticker for your laptop.
Our latest bit of development kit has now arrived - we’ll be doing a lot of playing testing with this in our commitment to ensuring a smooth Treasuremytext2 experience on all web platforms 
There’s many different technical aspects of developing a modern day web application. Today any decent Web 2.0 website behind the scenes is likely doing a bunch of fairly complex tasks in order to generate the HTML and images we actually see in our browsers. Probably the most unusual aspect of the technology that underlies Treasuremytext is our choice of Web Application framework (if those last three words bore you to tears you should probably stop now).
When we first began we knew we were embarking on making something more ambitious then anything else we had previously had experience of. After a brief consideration of Flash (yeah yeah but it’s what I knew at the time) it was clear that this project was going to need something a little more enterprisy. There were a couple of well known options around to pick from. The obvious ones being PHP/MySQL, ASP, Java, ColdFusion. We’re Mac people so so the first thing was that this had to be something that was going to be able to run on the Cube which had been commandeered from the living room of a family relative and assigned to the task of being our development machine. This ruled out a few things and significantly ruled something else in.
First stop was PHP. It is pretty easy to turn on with Mac OS X so I did a little futzing around with that but for whatever reason I just couldn’t get it. Things felt messy - there was all that code mixed up with your HTML for starters. My previous experiences were with development in things like Flash/Director which had more visual object orientated approaches. I wasn’t aware of it but what I was looking for was an object orientated web framework and something else that I would soon learn about a model-view-controller design pattern To get things going I needed tools and an environment which would ease the transition on this journey into new and unknown territory.
The journey began with a mysterious silver disc labeled OS X Developer Tools that comes included with every Mac or copy of OS X. Inside is a treasure trove of applications and technologies to get started in development on OS X. Where other companies like Microsoft sell you these tools, Apple was including them for free to invigorate a new wave of Macintosh developers to support their transition to its own new world of a modern Unix based Mac OS. Inside these discs are terrifyingly wonderfully named things such as MallocDebug and Pixie. Also on this disk is something called WebObjects.
My awareness of WebObjects went back to my earlier days in web development when using the first real WYSIWYG HTML editor for the Mac GoLive Cyberstudio. In those early versions before it was bought by Adobe was support for something called WebObjects tags. WebObjects was a web development technology originally created by NeXT and had early success as the first real object orientated web framework being used by big sites like the Dell Online Store and Disney (Dell since in a hilarious move rapidly dropped WebObjects after Apple became it’s new parents). During this period it had carried with it a reassuringly expensive $50,000 deployment license but that recently had been subject to a stunning price drop of $49,301 and a new cost of just $699 (it’s now free in every copy of OS X). Even though things like PHP were free and as such tempting, we basically figured that we could get something worth $50,000 for a tiny fraction of that cost and anything that cost that much, well it had to be good.
WebObjects got installed and after a search around for anything called WebObjects, found WebObjects Builder, fired it up to discover a familiar looking WYSISWIG HTML editor - hopes were raised as this looked deceptively easy. Things were clearly missing though, where was everything, how did you do stuff. There begin a transition from noddy Flash/HTML designer to hardcore Web applications engineer.
WebObjects is not a single application but a collection of Java frameworks and development tools that consist of Project Builder (Apple’s then IDE now XCode), the deceivingly named WebObjects Builder and EOModeler the database modeling tool and visible part of the magical Enterprise Objects Framework a core component of WebObjects. After some actual reading of some documentation I was led to Project Builder and a ‘Create New WebObjects Application’ assistant. Stumbling through this I ended up stared blankly at a brave new world of software Development. Not simplistic WYSISWIG editors and the visual development hand holding environments of Flash, Director and Dreamweaver, this was the real deal with jars, frameworks, consoles, compilers, builds, targets, you name it I didn’t have a clue what it meant.
This is the kind of moment we’re you know you need to be investing in some books. The one that got me started was “WebObjects Developer’s Guide” by Ravi Mendis. With the kind of luck which suggests God is giving you a signal and telling you to go for it I discovered the author of this one solitary book that I could find on this obscure web technology at the time just happened to be living around the corner. I went for coffee with Ravi; he was a nice guy, reassured me that WebObjects could do what I wanted. With Ravi as a possible backup in emergencies it was just the safety net we needed to have the confidence to go with it. Wide eyed (or maybe wild eyed), work on Treasuremytext started.
I worked my way through Ravi’s book, joined a rather lonely Yahoo WebObjects newbies group and built myself a hacky Treasuremytext all in about 6 months. Behind the scenes it was messy but it worked. Most of it still does and has been running Treasuremytext since with a surprising amount of reliability and little maintenance. Its testament to WebObjects and the Development Tools that came with it that it made such weird and wonderful things like database modeling, request response loops, object relational mapping and session management understandable and possible for a complete newcomer.
Since then we’ve been building web apps for ourselves, clients and employers in WebObjects and become hugely more experienced with it and become even more impressed with it in the process. It also turns out we actually happen to be in pretty good company. There are other people around using WebObjects including the BBC, Banking and Financial institutions and of course Apple themselves. From a rather haphazard beginning we’ve been lucky to build our product on what turns out to be considered the gold standard in Web application frameworks and a technology that after 10 years since its inception continues to be the inspiration and model for nearly all other web frameworks including Apache Tapestry, Seaside and to some extent the popular Ruby on Rails.
When it came to redeveloping Treasuremytext into a modern Web 2.0 application we had a few more choices than we had a couple of years ago. Ruby on Rails and Django are very popular web frameworks with a lot of momentum in the Web 2.0 set. So did we think about switching away from our curiosity of a web framework to something more mainstream? Not really. Since the time we began out with WebObjects it’s come a long way and there is a sense of a resurgent new appreciation for its technology and ongoing developments that means it can more than hold its own against these new imitators challengers.
Notable developments over recent years which have made this decision easy is the addition of support for WO development in Eclipse a real Java IDE, replacing the Cocoa/Objective-C centric XCode. This is made possible through WOProject/WOLips which has essentially replaced all the slightly long in the tooth Apple tools with modern day equivalents integrated within Eclipse. There is also Project Wonder, an open source collaboration that builds upon the WebObjects frameworks, improves them, fixes them, fills in the gaps and brings it right up to date with things like Ajax. These initiatives have matured greatly and are making WebObjects an even more attractive platform for rapidly developing a modern day web site with all the bells and whistles you could hope for. Add to that WebObjects robust and scalable J2EE deployment options and your in heaven. Most importantly there is an organized, resourceful, and incredibly helpful and supportive community surrounding the platform that are continually providing additional documentation, resources, support and help for new and experienced developers alike.
WebObjects still remains a niche curiosity to most web developers. Rather than anything to do with the technology this mostly is to do with it’s Apple centricity, dependence upon Java and its closed nature in a time where open source is all the rage. People just starting out tend to follow the current buzz and that was once with Java (remember that) but is now things such as Ruby and Python. Regardless the WebObjects platform is stronger than ever and remains unparalleled. Its continued evolution is virtually guaranteed by Apple’s dependence upon it and is coupled with a solid community surrounding it that continues to carry it forward.
When you use a website you really don’t care about the technology that’s underneath it right? As a user you only really care that it’s fast, it works, has got the features you want and if possible does it all within a slick and modern interface afforded by today’s browsers. All we can say is as users ourselves the new Treasuremytext 2 built in WebObjects is shaping up pretty nicely. We think it’s going to deliver on all of those things.
Next time I’ll talk about what’s changing, some of the other technologies we’re using and what kinds of features you can expect to see in the completely new and rewritten Treasuremytext 2 made of course in WebObjects.
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