Auto Respond and Bluetooth

I received a request a few days ago for a feature that I never even thought of. I don't use Bluetooth, so I often forget about it, but this user wanted the option to toggle Auto Respond when the phone connects to a Bluetooth device.

I thought it was a great idea, so I tried it out. It was actually extremely easy to implement, and now I'm working on building in some extra options for it, similar to the options for docking the phone. It might be a bit before it's done though.

I am going to be releasing this feature and its options as beta first, play around with them for a while to ensure that they work, and then release it. If you would like to help test this new feature, you only need to do a couple things:

• join my Google Plus community (this is required from Google, not by me)
• https://plus.google.com/u/0/communities/103951105335573781027
• Sign up to receive beta builds
• Free: https://play.google.com/apps/testing/com.havens1515.autorespondfree
• Pro: https://play.google.com/apps/testing/com.havens1515.autorespond

As always, please let me know if you have any issues. If you run into a crash bug (even though I don't expect you to) make sure to hit the "report" button so that I can get detailed information about where the bug occurred in my code.

If you want to opt out of the beta builds at any time, for any reason, go to that same link and you can opt out. These links have been posted to my community as well. If you are running a beta build and want to return to a production build after opting out you will need to uninstall the app and reinstall it, or wait until a new production build is released. This also is true of any Android app and is a limitation posed by Google, not me.

Updates and extras

Auto Respond

I pushed some new releases of Auto Respond over the past week or so.

One of them was a fix for the incompatibility between Auto Respond and Google Hangouts when SMS is enabled in Hangouts. The SMS message was never getting to Auto Respond when Hangouts was enabled. Once I figured out how to get the message to Auto Respond properly, the messages were displaying in the wrong order (reply was displayed before the original received message) so I had to figure that out as well.

The other update was to change the look of the "Preset Messages" screen. I noticed that the way that that list of messages works is completely different than the way that the list of schedules works. The messages have a press to set, and a long-press to get to the options. The schedules had buttons for all of it. So I changed the messages screen to resemble the schedules screen.

I also updated the screenshots in the store listing. A lot of the previous shots were from my phone, which is rooted and ROMed, so there were things in the screenshot that are not possible to have on a stock ROM of any sort. I used an emulator in the SDK to take new screenshots that were from a stock system.



Business

Also, as you may have noticed, I changed the look of the blog a lot. During November I had the purple theme for epilepsy, prior to that I had a generic theme that I had modified slightly. I have changed the layout to reflect my latest logo, which is displayed at the top.

I am still doing a lot of work in the background, so unfortunately I haven't had a lot of time to work on existing products. I am working with a friend of mine to get some really cool stuff done, and I can't wait to be able to share some specifics with all of you; Unfortunately, it will probably be at least a few more months before I can really get into details. I am hoping to have a launch date around summer time, but that will depend on how much free time my friend and I have to work on all of this as well as how quickly some of the other necessary paperwork can be processed.

What would help immensely is some financial help. There is a link on the left to make a donation via paypal. If you have Auto Respond Free, it would help if you would purchase the Pro version. Not only will it help my financial burden, but you will get some really nice extra features as well. All of this money (donations and purchases) will go to supporting development and paying for some other costs that I am incurring right now for the project that I am working on. Also, word of mouth is the best advertising for anything. Please tell your friends about my apps, as I'm sure that a lot of people will like them, and leave some positive feedback in the Play Store listing. More positive feedback = more visibility and more downloads.


Happy Holidays!

I hope that you are all enjoying the holiday season, and I will continue to post updates as often as I can.




TL;DR: a few Auto Respond updates, lots of behind the scenes work, need some funds for future projects.