Mike Rowehl: This is Mobility

Since it looks like carriers in the US aren’t really interested in people building SMS applications, I’ve been trying to figure out alternative ways to get messages to my handset. I registered Agile Messenger and played around with that. It used to be free, but now it’s a subscription product. Well worth it for Symbian devices, it’s a great messenger client. However it’s not quite working for what I want to do. I would like to deliver my messages over Jabber (Google Talk), cause I’ve done too much development in the past against Yahoo and AIM only to have the protocol change underneath me and get stranded. So I want to build on top of a public open standard. However my handset does tend to get lost, as in it looses the connection and doesn’t realize it.

Most of the time it’ll reconnect after a while, but not all the time it seems. And I want my handset to let me know when something is up, and not have to send a test message every once in a while to make sure that the link is really active. However, if that connection handling was cleaned up some this would be a decent way for me to get notifications to my phone. Certainly not great for the average consumer, but with Agile up in the background and the notification sound turned on it’s perfect. A little popup comes up saying I have a message in Agile, fantastic. Hopefully the Agile gods will smile and future versions will handle that XMPP connection in a way that detects disconnects more reliably.

I was thinking about trying to hack something together myself to handle the networking, just a simple read from a socket, some kind of ping/pong to make sure we have reliable activity on some schedule, and make a noise when you get real data. I have to imagine people have stuff like this floating around somewhere that I can just grab and use. Pointers anyone?

This entry was posted on Monday, November 27th, 2006 at 1:51 pm and is filed under ThisIsMobility. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.