The SMS Blog

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.