Incoming sms to desktop notifications

In this post I will share with you my experience on how to make sure you'll receive your sms as desktop notifications without missing any of them.

Smshare is using some of the cutting-edge HTML5 features supported by Chrome to provide you with more real-time, faster and better communication between your smartphone and your desktop/browser.

Thanks to Websockets, smshare extension and/or smshare Chrome web app brought your with real time sms to chrome notifications, without any unnecessary requests and without having many connections opened and closed needlessly in low-message-rate situations.

However in some environments the WebSocket connection may fail due to intermediary firewalls, proxies, routers, etc. You can check if your environnment is websocket friendly on http://websocket.org/echo.html (if the send button is enabled than it is ok, otherwise you have to wait websocket standardization or jump to the troubleshooting section below).

Even if you don't have websockets support, we are able to fall back to other transport modes so that you keep receiving your sms.

To start receiving your sms on your desktop, you need to enable sms-to-desktop notifications from ether the extension (extension → right click → options ) or directly from the website at : http://smshare.fr/account/remoteCommand.html

In the later case, Chrome will ask you if you want to allow or deny desktop notifications for smshare website, just click on the allow button.

Once activated, you can check that on your smartphone : smshare home screen → menu button → preferences → Incoming sms to desktop

This is a read only preference and you can't change it from the phone for the moment.

Today bonus is that we are rolling out a new feature which allows an easy way to reply to incoming sms from desktop notification.

Troubleshooting:

If you are enable to receive your sms as desktop notifications read the following, may be you'll find an answer.

1- Running smshare web app instead of smshare extension:
Desktop notifications are sent to the extension every time a new sms is received. This is not the case if you've intalled the smshare chrome app which you need to keep open. So if you hadn't installed smshare extension, do it now.

2- 3rd-party SMS app:
If you have installed an sms application on your smartphone make sure that it doesn't swallow incoming sms event. For example Go sms pro has this feature and you need to make sure it is disabled: Go SMS Pro → menu button → Settings → Receive Settings → uncheck disable other message notification.

3- Firewall issue:
Avast antivirus on a windows machine for example will block all websocket connections, even if you make an exception in avast, it doesn't seem to work. Smshare will fall back to other transport modes (like long polling, Adobe Flash socket, …).
As websocket is the best mechanism, you may want to disable the network shield and stop the network agent, but you are warned that if you have any security problem it will be on your own responsibility, do not do it if you are not sure about it.

4- Notification permission request issue:
Sometimes, when Chrome ask you if you want to allow or deny desktop notifications for a website, and you click on the allow button, you are still unable to receive Desktop notifications.
We have been experiencing this problem after a fresh install of Chrome 12.0.742.124 on Debian 6 (squeeze, 64 bits), and then syncing data with Google account. We needed to start Chrome from a new configuration directory to get the permission correctly installed and notifications working. The user profile directory can be found in ~/.config/google-chrome
Here is a ticket to a bug report, which may not be related to the same problem we've got.
http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=80063

Kudos goes to these new hosting platforms we are using: Joyent, Dotcloud, cloudfoundry and the hacky Nodester. Smshare try to spread load among these servers to keep each instance running smoothly.