Share My Creation RSMS - remote sms

this completes my sms trilogy. i've shared 2 earlier projects: my sms forwarder and my "out of office"
auto-reply. the current project - RSMS - involves sending sms from my laptop through an android device.

i, for one, have difficulty "typing" messages on a smartphone's keyboard. i do use a bluetooth keyboard
occasionally, but even that is not as responsive as a desktop keyboard (i am an all-fingers "touch" typist).

rather than re-invent the wheel, as is my wont, i've taken 2 of erel's examples (network sampler and
sendmultipartsmsmessage) and made a b4j driver and a b4a sms sender. images below.

you create your sms on your desktop pc, click on the send button, and your android device sends the sms.
since i already have sms forwarding in place, i could have the android device forward any responses back
to me on the desktop.

i realize it may be possible to send text messages from a pc (eg, through a dedicated service or even gmail), but
there are some legal issues in my part of the world relating to spoofing phone numbers for the purpose of sending texts.
in any case, i found it easy enough to use my pc to create an sms and then to let my phone send it.

 

[drgottjr]

this is an update to my remote sms project. as was explained previously,
you compose your sms on your desktop and your smartphone sends it. so,
the project consists of a b4j app for composing and a b4a sender on an android
smartphone.

the two apps are a little smarter this time: the android device broadcasts
its willingness to act as a proxy sms sender. the b4j app listens for that
broadcast. when it receives it, the ip address of the proxy sms sender is
revealed, and the composer connects to it. the smartphone of course has been
listening for such a connection.

in the first version, neither device knew the ip address of the other. erel's
example only had the devices' capturing their own ip address. the user then
had to manually key in the other device's address. not much of a problem, but
as an exercise, the devices now do a little "handshake" by themselves.
multicast could be used instead of broadcast, but it's a little more involved,
and my local network is too small to take advantage of multicast's benefits.

for the b4j composer i've added a modest selection of emojis which the user can
insert or append to the sms text. it would be nice maybe to have a grid with all
4 million emojis to choose from, but all i really wanted was some way to use a
fast, full-size keyboard for sms's. to my surprise when i sent a message with an emoji,
it was received in color even though the glyph appears in black and white on the
composer's screen! so win-win.

UPDATE:
have added a contacts search feature. if you don't have the contact's phone number handy,
you can get it from the smartphone. image attached