Tag: sms

Important Announcement about SMS notifications in Google Calendar

Catching up with emails, I saw this email from the Google Calendar team:

Starting on June 27th, 2015, SMS notifications from Google Calendar will no longer be sent. SMS notifications launched before smartphones were available. Now, in a world with smartphones and notifications, you can get richer, more reliable experience on your mobile device, even offline.

Too bad I say.  SMS notifications is one of the features I use and love the most about the Google Calendar.  My smartphone is full of all kind notifications.  In this day and age, it seems, every up considers it it’s duty to add something to the notification bar.  I’ll never configure each one of those to have a different sound, vibration mode, or LED color.  I don’t really care about them no more.

The ONLY notification that I care about 24×7, since my sysadmin shift days, is the SMS.  An SMS wakes me up in the middle of the night.  An SMS draws my attention in the noisiest of places.  An SMS interrupts my meetings.  That’s the one and only instance notification that I respect.

And now, it’s disappearing from the Google Calendar…

Damn you, Autocorrect!

Automatic spelling correctors are well known for their weird understanding of the world.  People had troubles with them for years, and it won’t be soon until the problem will be completely solved.  But from all those applications and devices, Apple iPhone stands out.  Maybe it has something to do with the popularity of the gadget, or maybe it does indeed has a weird auto correct program.  The reasons aren’t that interesting.  Interesting is the fact enough people got caught by it and had enough fun to create a website devoted to automatic correction mistakes – Damn You, Auto Correct!

There are tonnes of fun there!  Go, have a look, and subscribe to their RSS feed.  Don’t forget to share the best ones.

Type while walking problem solved

Even though I don’t ever type when I walk or drive, I can still aware of the problem.  And I think that this solution – a mobile phone application, which uses the camera to project the image in front of you as the background of your text entry – is really genius!  Simple, straight-forward, and utilizing available resources.

Via Download Squad.

Twitter limits outgoing SMS to 250 per week

I just noticed that there is now a limit of outgoing SMS messages from Twitter to your mobile phone.  Current number is 250 per week.  Apparently, this was introduced some time ago (a couple of weeks?), but only noticed it now.  There is no mention of it in Twitter Blog.

Twitter is not currently running any ads or membership services, so it’s hard to see how they can pay for all those outgoing SMS, except via a few investments that they got.  So, this limitation was somewhat expected.  It’s still sad to see it come, even though it’s high enough for most people not to hit it at all.

I think that Twitter will (or at least should) introduce some commercial packages with some extra features and several options for SMS limitations.  250/week for a free account sounds like a reasonable amount.