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LibraryH3lp is software used by libraries, educators, and non-profits for better customer service.

Tuesday, September 29, 2009

SMS Gateway (Android variety) updated

Back in March, we released the first version of our Android phone SMS gateway. It worked great on the original G1 phones, but then new models came out. A few libraries purchased G2 (Mytouch 3G or HTC Magic) phones and had problems, even though the phone's operating system should be the same.

Thanks to Derik Badman from Temple University physically shipping us one of these phones, the problem is solved. We were able to connect his phone to Eric's Mac and debug it pretty easily, once we had our hands on the actual device.

While we were working on the problem, we learned a couple of things that led us to add visible features to the phone portion of the application:
  1. Now, when you press the Start and Stop buttons, the phone displays feedback that the app actually started or stopped.
  2. There is a place to enter your phone's telephone number. As it turns out, not all Android phones actually know their own phone number, and without it, the LibraryH3lp gateway fails to deliver messages. Now, there is a field in the application where you can provide the phone's number. This is a lot easier than trying to get your mobile provider to correct this over the air.
The app should also work with international phone numbers now. We know it works for at least two libraries in two different non-US countries, anyway.

The updated app has the Android SMS gateway working for all libraries we're currently aware of that want to use it. Let us know if you're having trouble with it.

Derik, your phone is in the mail.

2 comments:

Karen Keiller said...

Thanks! As one of the libraries with a new phone, thanks much.

Pam Sessoms said...

Karen, thanks for the nice note! We'll be releasing another update in approx 3 weeks to address occasional dropped messages (the dropped msg problem has to do with various network conditions). More news then...