Squishing bugs, adding features

Over the past few days, I’ve been spending what little free time that I have (basically any time that I’m awake and not at work) working on Auto Respond.

I’ve found a few bugs, one of which I think I introduced in the latest beta, so you shouldn’t have to worry about that one. The others are all in the Dock menu.

For those of you on Android 4.0+, you may notice that after opening the dock menu and starting to scroll, some of your settings change. Amazingly this is not a bug caused by me. It’s actually a bug caused by a flaw in the Android OS which happens when you have consecutive settings screens, and one ore more of them have a switch preference. To my surprise, someone on Stack Overflow found a fix – and I implemented it. (If you are a coder and don’t know what Stack Overflow is, find out. If you’re not a coder, it probably doesn’t matter to you.)

For all versions of Android, the “Get current message” and “Preset messages” buttons for the dock message options were not working. Again, this has been fixed.

None of these changes have been released in any version, because before releasing my next beta I want to finish what I’ve started with data backup. Yes, that’s right… backing up the settings, messages, schedules, and whatever else may be included in Auto Respond. This will be available to free and pro users, and it will be using Google’s new backup service which puts the data in your Google account. That means that if you get a new phone you can just re-install the app and have all of your data back.

Also, I’m working on adding custom responses to each schedule in the Pro version. The custom responses was a lot of work to implement initially (which is why it’s a pro-only feature) and we’ll see how much work it takes to implement it per-schedule. I know I can do it, but it may take some time.

So there you have it. A lot going on in the way of changes and fixes in Auto Respond. The new version will hopefully be out in a week or so, depending on how quickly I can work.