Last Saturday, I made this app for sending SMS from your computer via your phone. It consists of an Android application and a Python GAE server. The source code is available on github. You can read more about it at [http://fauzism.com/post/37587975976/once-upon-a-saturday]a
[Shameless plug] I also wrote one of these a couple of years ago. I wanted it to run entirely from the phone though rather than all my messages going through some third party. I ended up using Restlet (<a href="http://www.restlet.org/" rel="nofollow">http://www.restlet.org/</a>) as the server, and writing a client in Backbone (in the early days).<p><a href="https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.stackednotion.textjs.rosebud&hl=en" rel="nofollow">https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.stackednot...</a><p>(I haven't touched it for a while, I don't even have an Android phone any more so no idea if it still works :P)
Definitely not useless!<p>Using an Android app as an SMS gateway is convenient for personal texting, but it's even more valuable for organizations working in developing countries -- where SMS is even more important, but services like Twilio don't provide local phone numbers and getting a shortcode can cost thousands of dollars.<p>My start-up (<a href="http://telerivet.com" rel="nofollow">http://telerivet.com</a>) works with a bunch of organizations that pay us for a more advanced version of essentially the same basic concept. (For example, Kiva.org uses our system to communicate with their borrowers in Kenya via an Android SMS gateway.)
This is very cool-- send text messages easily without ever leaving your laptop or having to deal with the phone's keys. For anyone over 30, texting from a real keyboard makes a lot of sense.
I was thinking of doing this exact thing, but I started another project.<p>Useless? I disagree entirely.<p>Having a place in the browser to text from is <i>priceless</i>. Perhaps the most obvious use case is texting without taking my phone out of my pocket? The next most obvious having a better and searchable UI to filter through texts?<p>It's a good project.
Did you use Google Cloud Messaging? If so, any chance you could post a tutorial or at least your thoughts on setting it up? There are a surprising lack of those around.
You might say it's useless (in your blog post) but would it surprise you to know that there's a venture funded startup doing pretty much what your weekend project does (with extra bells and whistles perhaps).<p><a href="http://mightytext.net/" rel="nofollow">http://mightytext.net/</a> <--- This one