[SailfishDevel] Sending SMS Messages from Sailfish Alpha 2

christopher.lamb at thurweb.ch christopher.lamb at thurweb.ch
Wed Aug 7 20:19:16 UTC 2013


Hi John

Thanks for extensive answer.

> You're barking up the right tree. This is an area of the stack I  
> want to change at some point, but for now, here's how it works:

It's good to hear that I was heading in the right direction, I will  
start looking deeper into this tomorrow morning on the train.

> So here's my question: What do you need in a basic messaging API? Is  
> the above (once usable from multiple applications) sufficient, or do  
> you need to prevent these messages from being in the user's message  
> history? Would simple dbus calls somewhere be nicer to use?

The SMS functionality my app requires is very simple (so far).

Use Case 1
----------------
The use case is this: Once a paraglider pilot has landed (hence the  
name), he can use the app to easily send an SMS containing GPS  
location coordinates to a recovery team. This is achieved by just a  
few clicks - no typing. The user just choses a predefined template to  
which the GPS Coords are added, and it then sent to a contact  
associated with the template.

So in terms of messaging APIs, all my app needs to be able to do is to  
send an SMS text to a phone number.
The message should behave just like an sms sent from the "normal" SMS  
app on the phone. (e.g. it should be found in the outgoing SMSes of  
the normal SMS app (and can be forwarded from there to a different  
contact).

I don't really care this is the only app able to send SMS while Landed  
is open, but it would be a problem if the user was unable to make /  
receive calls while the app was open.

The above case worked with Harmattan / Qt4 on my N9, and I was able to  
port it to the Sailfish Alpha 1 (and am now porting to Alpha 2).

Use Case 2
------------
Later I may do a companion App "Recovery", designed for the recovery  
team. This should pick incoming SMSes sent from Landed, parse out the  
GPS coordinates, and then give distance and direction from the GPS  
position of the recovery user. At the moment this is just an idea, so  
I have not yet thought in depth if the user should explicitly "get"  
SMSes from the inbox, or if incoming SMSes from Landed should somehow  
pop the Recovery App ...Then there is the problem of dealing with  
concurrent incoming landed SMSes ...

Chris



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