[General Topics] Menneisyys:
Finnish Aali Alikoski, Academic Developer Evangelist of Microsoft Finland, has just released a highly useful application, SMS Notifier, along with its source code.

The application offers some really nice and, up to now, to my knowledge, on the Pocket PC Phone Edition platform, unprecedenced functionality: it waits for unanswered incoming calls and, depending on the configuration settings, it either sends an SMS message to the caller (with configurable contents), possibly containing also the end time of current appointment (this is also configurable) or adds an item to the system-level Windows Mobile calendar (containing the caller info).

The latter functionality is nothing new – you can check the caller's identity and the call date/time in any low-end mobile phone. The former – that is, the SMS feedback –, however, is really long-awaited!

Downloading and Installation

You can download the application here. Transfer the CAB file to your PDA and execute it there.

If, after installing and upon starting SMS Notifier, you're presented this error message, make sure you download and install .NET CF 2.0 from Microsoft. Make sure you install it in the main memory. Also note that, as the application heavily relies on the new, connectivity/database-related libraries of .NET CF2, it's not very easy to port it to run under the earlier Compact Framework library. (For CAB lovers, you will only need c:\Program Files\ Microsoft.NET\SDK\CompactFramework\ v2.0\WindowsCE\wce500\armv4i\NETCFv2.wm.armv4i.cab ; you can also download it from here (to avoid having to download the 24 Mbyte-long MSI installer).

Configuration

On the main set-up screen, there're some checkboxes in AND relationship. The first one, Send SMS to unanswered callers, instructs the application to send an SMS to everybody that tries to call you but his or her calls remain unanswered. Using (not disabling) the second two checkboxes, however, you may make the application not send a SMS to anyone that calls you, just to the ones that call you during an active/busy appointment.

The checkbox/text input area at the bottom makes it possible to report the end of the current appointment so that he or she can know when you are reachable again.

The Calendar tab contains only one checbox, which instructs the application to enter all the incoming calls into Calendar.

Note that the configuration settings are not correctly saved/restored, as the author also points out.

Usage

To use the application, just start and configure it to your liking. Do not click the Quit button – then, it won't send your callers any SMS. Just let it run. You can, of course, suspend the PDA while you do so and also minimize the application. This also means you can safely start it from \Windows\Startup (just like the other highly recommended application, PMRecorder – please see this article on it if interested) – if it's running in the background, it'll safely catch all unanswered calls.

Other stuff

I also recommend the author's blog here. Don't be taken aback of some of the material's being in Finnish: there's nothing really interesting in them for non-Finns (the Finnish blog posts are only about local, Finnish meetings, conferences). Unfortunately, some of the other Finnish .NET bloggers (see the links in the lower left of the page) post exclusively in Finnish, even highly technical stuff that would be interesting for non-Finnish speakers too. (Feel free to ask me in my blog for a public translation for some of them if really interested.)