Wednesday, July 27, 2011

Whether it's a good idea or not...

As the title implies, this may or may not be a good idea, but here's the story of how I drug my pager into the 21st century.
So I used to have an iPhone and used Google Voice but at the time there wasn't an official Google Voice app (which ended up being a bit of a dud in my opinion) and the best jailbreak app that I could find at the time (GVMobile+) didn't support push notifications. There were some solutions out there, but they usually involved routing your data through a 3rd party server and that made me feel a little uncomfortable. So I looked into Google App Engine and made my own forwarding server. Yes, it was still going through a 3rd party server, but it was one that I at least had the warm fuzzy of having control over (who knows what Google may or may not be doing with all the data my app receives, processes and sends).
Shortly after getting this all up and running, the official Google Voice app came out and not too long after that I switched to an Android phone, so this project became useless and just sat on the shelf...
That is until I resurrected it to send all my Google Voice notifications to my pager. Most of the time it's unnecessary because I have my phone, but when I don't, it's nice to still get timely notification of texts, voicemails and missed calls. But the best part about it is that to everyone else in the world, they don't have to worry about whether they should call my phone or my pager. I just give out my Google Voice number and it now can act as the single point of contact for me whether I have my phone or not.
So, if you're interested in using this, then check out the new gvpush4pager project.

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