After about 10 minutes of programming, the Auto Respond default message is now editable. So that’s one more thing off of that to-do list I posted a few hours ago.

The default message is not just something that is clickable in the message list. It is also used when the auto respond message on the main screen is emptied. Therefore, if you want to set a new default message, you have two easy ways of getting to that message as well. (Hopefully 3 when I get widgets working)

This feature has not been released yet. I want to make a few more changes/addition before releasing a new version.

The new version of Auto Respond has been published. I did not get the “Do Not Respond” text list working exactly as I wanted, so I left that out for now. I want it to be case insensitive, and it was not quite working when I tried that. The contact picker option IS included, and has been tested and verified working. Contact pictures may not show up correctly in the contact picker Do Not Respond list (last I checked on my Droid 2 they didn’t work, but the same code worked fine on my Galaxy Nexus.)

I also fixed some other small issues in the new version, including a FC in Froyo, and an issue with the way ads displayed in the free version.

Check out the “What’s New” tab when it is published for all the details:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.havens1515.autorespond

The newest Auto Respond function is almost finished! “Do Not Respond” lists are the latest addition to Auto Respond’s quickly growing feature list. I’ve created two ways to add contacts to your do not respond lists:

1) Contact Picker – This is a very precise method to select an individual contact to not send auto replies to
2) Text List – Add names such as “John” or “John Smith” and Auto Respond will not send replies to any name that matches the text in the list.

The contact picker option is what took so long to create. Getting information from the contact picker is a bit of a process, then processing that data was another process. All of that is done now.

There is just some small tidying up that is left on the “to-do list”. Part of that is checking for duplicates in the Contact Picker list, and then comparing the incoming number to the contacts in the Contact Picker list to decide whether or not a response should be sent. These are fairly simple tasks when compared to what I’ve done so far.

Things that do work:

A list can be created from the contact picker
The list contains contacts’ photo, name, and number
Items in the list can be edited or deleted
A text list can be created
Names in the text list are not responded to

Update should be released within a couple days if all goes well. 🙂

I’m working on a custom “Do Not Respond” list. I initially started building it as just a text list, but decided that’s a stupid way to go about it. If you have two people listed in your contact list with the same name (Which, amazingly I do have at lease 1 set of contacts with the same first AND last name) it would block them both, since it is blocking by name.

So I decided to try to implement a contact selector instead. This idea should block based on contact number, which is a number unique to each contact in your address book, instead of by name. I haven’t implemented the actual contact selector yet, but looking at some sample code, it doesn’t look to be too outrageously difficult. It may take some time though.

Here is a preview of what the “Do Not Respond” list will look like. If the contact has a picture associated with it, it will display that picture instead of the generic contact picture.

I may keep the blocking by name in as well, but I’ll have to think about how to implement both of them at once. (I’m sure it won’t be too hard, I just have to take the time to do it.)

A new version of Auto Respond has been published to the Google Play Store! It adds the ability to auto respond to phone calls that you receive. Both the free version and the pay version have been updated.

It may be an hour or so until it is actually updated in the Play Store, but the update has been uploaded and published. Now it’s up to Google’s servers to do the rest.

The free version of Auto Respond for Android has been posted! Right now it’s still being published to the Google Play Store, but in an hour or so it will be available here:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.havens1515.autorespondfree

I think I’ve given up on widgets (for now) for my Auto Respond app. I’m going to start working on other features, and leave widgets alone for a while.

I think I’m going to work on the auto respond to voice calls feature. I’ll return to widgets later, when I’m not so frustrated by them.

This weekend I was working on creating widgets for my Auto Respond Android app. I ran into a couple problems:

1) When I try to change the text on the widget, the app force closes.

I’m trying to make a widget that has a specific message connected to it, so that you can easily turn on an auto response with a preset message from your home screen. I’d like the widget to contain the title of the selected message, so that the user knows what message is being set when the widget is clicked. When I try to set this text, I get an FC.

2) No matter what I do, I can’t seem to make anything happen when I click the widget.

I’ve looked at sample code, tried many things, but no matter what I try, nothing happens when I click the widget. I don’t really know what I’m doing wrong, because according to all the code I’ve seen, my code should be working.

I have a couple ideas for different widgets once I understand how to do all of this. The next one that comes to mind is a widget that shows your current auto response message, a quick turn on/off of Auto Respond, and a quick way to change your auto respond message to either a custom value, or a preset value. This widget would be a 1×4 widget.