I’ve published Auto Respond 1.0.1 to the Play Store.

The only difference is that it now handles responses over 160 characters, and it has a character counter under the text input on the main window to show you how many characters you have left. If you go over 160, it will display something like “142/2” showing that you are on your 2nd set of 160 characters, and that you have 142 characters left before going over another 160.

For most modern phones these messages will be received as 1 piece. But for users with older phones, or non-smart phones, they will be received as multiple messages, each containing 160 characters or less.

As usual, this update has been published, but may not be live on Google’s severs for a an hour or more.

If anyone runs into another issue such as this, please let me know so that I can correct it.

Just to let you all know, I’ve been working with a user who was having problems with Auto Respond not sending his response message. I added some diagnostic code to try to figure out what the issue was.

He just got back to me, saying that he shortened his message and now it works fine. This leads me to believe that in its current state, Auto Respond may have issues sending long response messages. Usually the limit for each SMS message is 160 characters, so I’m assuming he went above this limit.

I will be looking into this issue, testing and finding the actual limit that causes the issue, and then finding a way to work around this limit. I may have to break the messages up into smaller blocks and send multiple messages, or there may be a way for me to send it that allows for a larger character limit. (I know that above 480 characters, sending as an MMS is usually recommended.)

Once I figure out what this limit is for sure, I may put a character counter under the message telling the user how many characters remain before entering unsafe territory.

Bottom line – I will be working on fixing this, and will hopefully release an update within a couple days to address this issue. I just wanted all of you to be aware that there IS a limit, and if your responses are not being sent correctly you may need to temporarily shorten your response message.

I just pushed Auto Respond 1.0 to the play store!

Change log:

(Common)

• Fixed some lingering bugs
• Updated “Help” and “Do Not Respond List Description” screens
• User can now swipe left and right to change between tabs on main screen (This is kinda laggy, so it may be improved upon later)
• removed some incomplete settings from the menu (They were deactivated so you couldn’t use them anyways)
• removed “OK” and “Cancel” buttons from main page. Back button saves and exits.

(Paid Only)

• Added scheduler
• WAKE_LOCK permission needed for scheduler

(Free Only)

• Moved ad locations

Late last night and today I’ve been doing a lot of testing of the scheduler.

As expected, there were a lot of bugs in the initial version, but I fixed a TON of them last night, and some more this morning.

As far as I can tell, everything seems to be working flawlessly on Android 4.1.2. I haven’t tested other OS versions yet, but over the next couple days I will start testing on 2.3.

As of now, I expect to release the new version on Monday or Tuesday.

It’s done!  The scheduler is done!

I spent almost all day today working on understanding how the alarms are scheduled, as well as how they are triggered, and how to deal with time zone offsets. It took me hours just to understand the flow of control with alarms. But after many hours, and a drawing of program flow, it seems to be working very well.

I’ve only tested a schedule that occurs every day, not yet testing whether the day of week selections or month selections work properly. I have built in checks for those things, but they aren’t yet verified to be working properly. I will test both of those things throughout the week across multiple OS versions.

I have already set up 1 schedule that I will be using on a weekly basis, and I will find out Monday morning if that is triggered properly.

As stated in my last post, I expect to have this fully tested and released before the end of next week. With any luck, it’ll be early to mid next week.  🙂

I’ve been working on the schedule for Auto Respond a lot recently. Today, I finished the ability to edit/delete the schedules.

It may sound like a minor victory to you as a reader, but it took a LOT of work to get this working properly. (Mostly because I couldn’t figure out why I wasn’t able to click/long-click the schedule list. Once I figured out what was going on there, it wasn’t too bad.)

Things that still need work:

• The checkbox on the list of schedules currently does nothing
• Eventually it will activate/deactivate individual schedules
• The schedules themselves still do nothing
• When the schedules are activated/deactivated I need to set an “alarm” which is acted upon
• When the “alarm” is triggered, I need to enable/disable auto respond and change the current message

More bug fixes mostly with this update.

• Fixed an issue that may make it impossible to edit the title of a message in the “Preset Messages” list
• Fixed an issue with deleting preset messages
• Changed layout of “Preset Messages” list

I have made some good progress on the scheduler today and yesterday. Schedules are saving, and they are displaying correctly in a list on the scheduler tab.

I still have to work on editing and deleting the schedules once they are created, and actually scheduling an action once the day/time of the start and end of the schedule occur, but I did actually make a lot of progress. I also made a lot of changes to what the schedule list looks like (not that you guys know what it looked like before, but I spent a LOT of time perfecting it.)

Here’s what it looks like right now:

Those are all dummy schedules, setup to show a variety of different possible configurations for the schedule (and a variety of different use cases.)

The End Goal:

Each of those schedules has a message specific to the schedule, which is set at the creation of each individual schedule. Therefore, you can set the meeting message to say “I’m in a meeting, I’ll be out at 9.” and you can set the class message to say “Busy learning math,  I’ll be available around noon.” As stated above, I will be working on the ability to edit these messages, and the rest of the detail of each schedule. Editing and deleting will be available upon long-pressing the schedule, just like how the list of preset messages works. (At least, that’s the plan as of now.)

When the schedules trigger, they will set the current message and turn on Auto Respond. When the scheduled event ends, it will return Auto Respond to its previous on/off state, and return your message to whatever it was before the beginning of the scheduled event. (This behavior may end up becoming an option – whether you would prefer it to return to the previous state at the end of a scheduled event, or turn off at the end of the scheduled event regardless of the previous state.)

Unfortunately, none of that actually happens yet. What you see here is basically what is working, and nothing more. It displays, it doesn’t actually work yet.

I will continue to work on getting this working whenever I have free time. I have decided that this WILL be a paid-only feature. If you want the scheduler ability, you will have to pay $.99 for the paid app.