Free SMS via RetroFone gateway, final version

[Guest paulend]

try this http://www.modaco.com/download.php?id=48

[Guest stillwaiting]

Thanks paulend but that didn't work either. I got an error message

'sorry but you are not authorized to view or download this Attachment'.

Any ideas why?

[Guest ajb3000]

hhmmm.... strange one that, download it from here instead: http://www.monolithix.org/apps/RetroSPVSMS.zip

[Guest amo]

Right, a quick question. GPRS is charged at the ammount of data sent/received right? Well this html file sends 1b per number/char im guessing. So if there is a full 159 chars, plus the senders number and recipients number, the max bytes will be around 181b. Lets round this up just incase any data is received too. Lets call it 200b. Now i know this is a very tiny ammount of data. But i was just wondering how much this would cost if we were on a "normal" gprs package rather than the spv promo pack. It'd be handy to know how much it will cost when the promo runs out. If the 200b value is too smal to calculate the cost, how about 1kb (5 sms's sent)

[Guest ajb3000]

I believe the new GPRS tariffs charge at £2/MB

So thats £2 for 1024kb

Which makes 0.195p per kb

if you get 5 SMS per kb then thats 0.04p

Let me see, 0.04p per SMS or Oranges 10p per SMS??

For 1 SMS sent via Orange you could send 250 SMS through this program

[Guest stillwaiting]

Thanks ajb3000....... now to get a texting, Yeehah!!!!!!!!!!!

[Guest ajb3000]

Please try not to abuse the service tho or RetroFone may take it down which would spoil everyones fun!!

[Guest Scoobyroo]

Quickie

After I've run the .JS file and place the contacts.htm file in the correct place i do indeed see all my contacts. However I have over 300 and they are not in alphabetical order.

I've checked the .CSV file produced by Outlook and that was also in random order. I used sort to place it in Alphabetical order, saved the file, run the .JS file again and moved the resulting contacts.htm to the phone. to my suprise, the names are all still in random order???

Am I missing something or are the names supposed to be in random order?

Cheers

[Guest ajb3000]

Well it was 'HelloDave' who wrote the javascript, so you'll have to get him to confirm this but it as far as I know it *should* put the contacts in the order in which they appear in the .csv file. For some reason all my contacts are in order except the bottom 3, but they are in the same order as the .csv.

ok, I just had a play with it and the javascript *DOES* put the contacts in the same order as they are the in csv file. Double check that you saved it properly.

[Guest HelloDave]

After I've run the .JS file and place the contacts.htm file in the correct place i do indeed see all my contacts. However I have over 300 and they are not in alphabetical order.

This is because the original csv file wasn't in alphabetical order - all contacts.js does is process the csv file linearly, one line at a time from the top, so what goes in must come out! TBH I was too lazy to put a sort into contacts.js because then I'd have to read the data into an array instead of just putting it straight into contacts.htm, which is a pain in the a*se! I tried this once before with a different script and ended up having to use a full Java program becuase javascript wasn't flexible enough.

I've checked the .CSV file produced by Outlook and that was also in random order. I used sort to place it in Alphabetical order, saved the file, run the .JS file again and moved the resulting contacts.htm to the phone. to my suprise, the names are all still in random order???

Have a look at contacts.csv in notepad - you'll find the records are still unsorted! (Though I don't know why that could be)

Two kludges to make life more bearable :wink:

- Try sorting your csv file in Excel (or even Access). As long as the header stays in the file (the "First name","Last name", "Mobile Number" bit) and the fields are in the same order I can't see why it wouldn't work, and a spreadsheet is a lot more flexible than my javascript!

- When you've opened the contacts list on the SPV, press the first letter of the name you want to find and the SPV will highlight and move to the next record for you, and this doesn't just work for the first entry like the contact search on most Nokias. For example, say I have a list of 300 contacts in random order, a sample of which is

Jamie


Dave


Bob


Gaz


Donkey


Sheep

If I highlight Jamie and press D, Dave will be highlighted. Now if I move the selection down to Bob and press D again Donkey will be highlighted. I found this out by accident, but it's how I get round having an "almost but not quite sorted" contacts list!

[Guest Scoobyroo]

Ok, thanks guys I'll give it another try later. As long as I know that I can get them into the SPV in some form of order, it's worthwhile me bashing away at it until it works.

Thanks again, I'll let you know how it goes.

[Guest djthorp]

Hi guys,

Thanks for this its gonna be really useful.

I'm trying to get the app to allow me to select from a choice of numbers to send from (I have a sim on o2 too and would like to be able to send from this number without having to type it in the sender box)

I tried setting up a radio box option on sms.html where the text box was for the sender but having done this, my messages wont send

My other option was to pass the sending number into sms.html from contacts.htm in a similar manner to the contact number being passed. However this appears to be done using java script and my knowledge of this is rather limited

Can anyone help

Thanks

Dave

[Guest djthorp]

It's ok guys i've fixed it

Dave

[Guest ajb3000]

It seems that the gateway is down, and checking the RetroFone website it says they've taken it down for maintanence and it should be back up by 6PM.

NOTE: The software will still allow you to send messages and it will still tell you the message has been sent as this refers to it being sent to RetroFone. As the gateway seems to be down the message will just be 'lost'. Check the website at www.retrofone.info/spv to see if its back up before sending any more messages.

[Guest fraser]

Suggestion if you use categories

Like a lot of folk who use Outlook in a corporate environment, I have a lot of contacts in it. It's a big company I work for, and this phone is for personal use not business, so I don't want lot's of names of people I've never heard of.

I manage my contacts through Outlook categories. I have one for work, one for personal and another for work numbers I'd like available on my phone. ActiveSync is configured to only sync up the categories "Personal" and "Work - Close". However, when I use this tool, the entire directory gets copied across.

What you can do to limit the contacts coming through to the SPV is to also include "Categories" in the list of fields you output to the csv file. Then, load the file into Excel and sort the data based on the Categories field. (Data/sort menu & tick "header row", make sure only one cell or the entire table is selected when launching the sort option).

Now you can easilly delete the ones you are not interested in. When finished, delete the entire column for the categories, re-sort the list by "Surname" then "First name", save the file (as a csv file), then run the script as normal.

Serve immediatly on a bed of rice. Enjoy!

Bugs:

I've noticed that if the commas do not have a space on either side of them, then the first (or last letter) is chopped off. Hmm, not a true CSV file, tsk tsk. ;-)

To fix this, before running the .js file, open the file in Wordpad and run a replace of (without the quotes): "," to " , " (note the space on either side)

Also, the first character of each line can get chopped off. To fix this, in Excel:

Right-Click on the column A (the header) and select "Insert"

Type a "-" character in the first cell, A1

Select this cell and click on the square box in bottom right of the selection box. Drag this to the end of the data, so that each entry has this.

Save the file and open in WordPad

Do a search and replace for "-," with " "

Save and re-run the .js script

Phew, a bit more complicated than I first thought. If I'm missing something obvious to make these workarounds irrelevant, please tell me!! :)

[Guest asif @ planus]

Hi,

Yes, sorry about this. It's clickatell playing up again, so we are going to try and get it back online as possible and we are going to be implementing 3 or four gateways to amke sure all messages get sent.

Regards

Asif

[Guest HelloDave]

Fraser - I think the problems you've been having must be something to do with the way Excel saves csv files as I've never had any problems with losing letters using the csvs directly from Outlook. The script was written specifically to work with Outlook, so I haven't tested it with Excel, but thanks for your comments!

[Guest Shane]

HelloDave

Great app, ell done and thanks.

I get the same problem of "cut short" names if I sort the CSV in Excel and then run it through your script?

Shane

[Guest HelloDave]

Post a bit of your CSV file on here and i'll have a look at it :)

[Guest Shane]

Thanks Dave I've sorted it, Space at the front and the back of each field sorts it. I also hacked the Html in Front page a bit.

Keep writing stuff like this.

Shane

[Guest fraser]

Are you still looking for a sample CVS file from Excel...? Let me know if you are.

[Guest fraser]

Oh, just remembered...I noticed last night that the missing characters where also happening to the phone numbers. Explains why none of my messages get through!

It would be great if there was some feedback though...presently if an SMS fails for whatever reason, you don't know. If it's a reply back to the hot date you had, things could get tragic! :)

"Why didn't you get back to me??"

[Guest djthorp]

Any word on when the sms server is gonna be back online. It was sposed to be 6pm last night.

The website still says 6pm. Can we take it this is now 6pm today?

Dave

[Guest HelloDave]

It would be great if there was some feedback though...presently if an SMS fails for whatever reason, you don't know. If it's a reply back to the hot date you had, things could get tragic!

Lol! The SPV script can only be as good as RetroFone's server side script, and at the moment all that does is redirect you to another page if it recieves the data in sms.htm correctly, so if the "Send another" page appears you know the server has got your SMS. What it does with that data afterwards of course you'll never know...

On the subject of missing spaces in csvs, these lines from my csv file work perfectly -

"First Name","Last Name","Mobile Phone"


"Richard","Smith","+447790222888"


"","Zoe"


"","Ed","+447984444555"


"Mary",""


"","Jessica","+44783456654"

Note: the numbers must have a + as the first letter, and obviously any entry without a phone number doesn't get included in contacts.htm.

One problem I had with Excel was that it refused to read the mobile number field as anything but a number, not text, which lost the "+" - I don't know if this is why other people are having problems.

Like I said; post bits of your csvs that aren't working and i'll have a look at them.

[Guest fraser]

Bingo!

Excel is stripping out the quotes. That explains the missing characters, and the *.js must be using string(2) as the start of the text field, instead of checking whether the first char is a quote or now.

Other than the lack of quotes, the output from Excel is identical.

An updated *.js script could be made to handle this. Any takers? :)