emitSMS dashboard widget
Write text messages in dashboard, send through mobile phone using bluetooth. Works with most bluetooth enabled phones from Nokia, Motorola, Samsung, SonyEricsson and others.
Write the phone number in the top line, the message below and press send. The bluetooth icon color will inform you when message has passed through your phone and onto the cellular system. Hovering the mouse pointer above the icon will display additional information.
You will be charged the same amount by your phone company for messages sent through the widget, as for regular messages typed and sent through your phone. One short message can contain up to 160 characters, but the widget will allow larger messages by using several short messages if needed, as supported by your phone. When using letters outside the west european alphabets each short message only has room for 70 characters.
Widget can use phones that Address Book does not support, but there are probably phones where Address Book works and this widget does not.
The widget can search your address book for people, allowing you to refer to friends by name instead of number. Note that only contacts in your computers Address Book are searched. Messages can be stored in a text file, inside "Application Support:emitSMS widget" in your users Library folder. That would be "$HOME/Library/Application Support/emitSMS widget/" to the unix inclined.
Download emitSMS 1.99 (216k).Development on emitSMS has stopped as of august 3rd 2008. The last six months I have wanted to implement many improvements but have not had nearly enough time in between paying jobs. As a consequence I am releasing the widget under a MIT license, to allow others to continue.
Anders Borum
FAQ
- Does emitSMS work with the Apple iPhone?No. Many basic phone features are still not present in the iPhone but might appear later. The iPhone will probably gain the ability to act as a bluetooth modem before gaining the ability to be used with emitSMS.Does the widget work with my Blackberry?No.Can I send one message to two or more recipients at once?You can but is is not very user friendly, unless you have the recipients grouped in Address Book. You can type the phone numbers with semicolon in between and the sms will be sent to all those numbers. But if you write the name of a group, the search result for that group will contain a phone number for each person in that group.When will the widget be able to read SMS from my phone?Due to limitations of Nokia series-40 phones, which is what the development team (me) and quality assurance team (also me) currently use, SMS reading lies in the distant future.How come only some phone numbers are shown for each contact?The widget prefers phone numbers that have the mobile type.
It will only show mobile type phone numbers for contacts, unless the contact has no phone numbers with the mobile type. In that case it will show all numbers.
Bluetooth configuration
The first time you use the widget a connection to your phone must be choosen. You can try each one on the list until you find a port that responds and identifies as the right phone. If no suitable port is available or you dislike trying to connect to every phone in your office, you can open Bluetooth Preferences and find out what the serial ports on your phone are named or create a new one. People are having the best luck with serial ports with a Dial-up networking device service and a RS-232 port type, but this varies with phone model.
Some phones asks you for confirmation each time the widget tries to send a message. Consult your phone manual on how to automatically allow connections from your computer.
When selecting the serial port to communicate through or sending messages, errors saying that resource is busy can indicate that phone has bluetooth turned off, is outside bluetooth range or that bluetooth connection is in use by some other application.