Matt's Life Bytes

After 5 long months of working on it, Google Voice Easy SMS 2.0 is now released to the public, for free, like always!

I’ve not been able to find a free application for Windows Mobile that allows easy text messaging (SMS) via your Google Voice account. I wanted something easy to use that also pulls from the phone’s contacts list. So since I couldn’t locate an app that suites these needs, I created one. After all, I’m a broke college student and I want something to give me free outgoing messages. Speaking of being broke, if you like what you see, consider donating using the PayPal button just below, anything at all would be greatly appreciated!

Download Now:
Touchscreen Devices: GoogleVoiceEasySMS-2.0-Touchscreen.cab
Non-Touchscreen Devices: Coming Very Soon!

Important Installation Note:
Once you have downloaded and installed Easy SMS, you’ll need
to enter your Google Account information by going to ‘Menu’ -> ‘Settings’ -> ‘Google Account Settings’. Fill in the info, then do ‘Menu’ -> ‘Check for Messages’.

XDA-Developers Forum Thread:
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=604699

Project Source Code (Visual Studio 2008 Professional):
Touchscreen Devices: GoogleVoiceEasySMS-2.0-Touchscreen-Source.zip
Non-Touchscreen Devices: Coming Very Soon!

By the way, please don’t mirror the installation files, just link to http://www.mattslifebytes.com/?cat=7 to ensure that current versions always get distributed. Thanks!

New In Version 2.0

• Pretty much everything is new!
• Easy SMS is now a full suite application. You can both send and receive Google Voice SMS through it for FREE.
• All bugs with the old 1.x series have been fixed.

Features:

• It’s free. Who doesn’t like free stuff?
• Sends and automatically receives messages via the cellular data plan, meaning your outgoing SMS costs you nothing
• Interfaces with your phone’s contacts list
• Connects directly to Google via SSL to send your message, no man-in-the-middle servers that could potentially harvest your Google Account password
• Signature support
• Send to multiple recipients at once

Easy SMS is completely open-source!

Requirements:

• Windows Mobile based device; software has been tested on versions 6, 6.1, and 6.5, but the program may work with other versions.
• .NET Compact Framework 3.5
• A Google Voice account
• Cellular data plan or WiFi connectivity
• If your cellular data plan charges by the kilobyte, be sure to keep track of your usage; this program uses very little bandwidth, but don’t try to blame data charges on me
• You must abide by the Google Voice terms of service when using this program

Google has a bad habit of changing the way stuff works without letting people know. If you find that this program suddenly stops working, it could be because Google changed a setting and broke the way this program works. Check this site for info on known issues and patch releases.

Want to make calls easily via Google Voice from your Windows Mobile phone? Try iDialer and iContact, visit http://supware.net for those amazing programs.

I’ve tried to be very thorough in testing, but you never know. Find something odd? Tell me how to reproduce the error and I’ll try to take care of it. Toss me an e-mail

Oh no! Google changed how authentication works on their end, and this change has broken Easy SMS. I’ll be releasing version 2.0 on Friday, which will address these issues and update the software to be able to both send and receive messages.

So I’ve been coding away on Google Voice Easy SMS lately (a program to send free text messages via Google Voice). I’ve found out something the hard way, hopefully know someone else won’t have to!

When my app would try to send a message to Google, for some people Google would reply with:
{“ok”:false,”data”:{“code”:20}}

or…

{ok:false,data:{code:20}}

or…

(500) Server Error

So what was the problem? Read on. It gets technical from here, just FYI…

My app does this to SMS someone:

POST https://www.google.com/voice/sms/send/

auth=GOOGLE_AUTH_STRING&phoneNumber=PHONE_NUMBER_TO_SMS&text=MY MESSAGE&_rnr_se=GOOGLE_KEY

Google wants phoneNumber, text, and _rnr_se to be URL encoded. For instance ‘text=my message’ becomes ‘text=my%20message’. Most programming languages have some library or class already built to do the job automatically. If you want or need more details on that, just e-mail me.

My problem was that I was not URL encoding the value of _rnr_se and that causes Google to spew either one of the two errors mentioned above. In my defense, I thought the value of _rnr_se was always alphanumeric and therefore didn’t need URL encoding. It took me about 10 hours to figure out the problem; hopefully anyone else with that issue finds this post first!

This version of Google Voice Easy SMS is out of date. Click here for the newest release:

http://www.mattslifebytes.com/?cat=7

This version of Google Voice Easy SMS is out of date. Click here for the newest release:

http://www.mattslifebytes.com/?cat=7