Thursday, February 18, 2010

Finally release webservice version of GVMax

Today I have finally released the webservice version of GVMax. I hope people like it.

It is loosely based on the appengine version in terms of functionality, but it was an almost complete rewrite.

Maintaining so many copies of the appengine version was getting out of hand. This new version has a lot of new stuff, some of which are not readily visible. For example the GTalk integration is a lot better, providing better feedback and is more robust. If you get logged out of GTalk it GVMax will fallback to Prowl or Email notifications.

I also tried to make it as easy as possible for people to try it out. If you link your account at GVMax to your Google Voice credentials, GVMax will automatically do all the setup for you. Even if you don't on the page that describes how to setup the filters I have a button to set it all up for you (it will ask for your Google Voice password) but will NOT store it.

The new HTTP Post and developer API I also think is nice. I will be working on the API side of things in the next couple of weeks and will be adding what I think is a real cool feature. Stay tuned...

A new Twitter notifier, right now this is very simplistic but stay tuned....

Anyway so far so good, only had to redeploy the app once due to a small bug I found.

Wednesday, February 10, 2010

New version of GVMax coming soon

Have been working on a 'webservice' version of GVMax. This works a bit like GVMax-Lite used to in that users don't host an application on app engine. Instead they simply sign-up via a web interface.

Signing up is really easy, just enter your google voice email and password and gvmax does everything including creating gmail filters etc...

The Google Voice password is not a requirement. Users can choose not to use their Google Voice password but that means they will not be able to reply to SMS using IM or email. They can still get notifications via email, prowl, xmpp and httpPost (new).

Some of the new features include

HttpPost notifications
: A new notification method, where GVMax performs an HTTP post with all the information related to the SMS or Voicemail notification.

More Robust: This code is alot more robust than the current one. For example if you set to receive xmpp notifications and gvmax cannot send you a notification (if you are not logged in) it will attempt to fallback to other notification methods such as prowl. The user is also notified whenever an error occurs.

FREE: Since I will not be installing app engine applications and the whole setup has been automated, all features are completely free.

So what does this mean to existing GVMax users. For those that payed for GVMax-Pro they
can continue to use it as is. I will keep the current buddy server going for a little while, but will
eventually shut it down (for non GVMax-Pro customers). I will stop adding new features to
GVMax-Pro and only release essential bug fixes. It is simply too much work trying to maintain
so many copies of the program (where users don't always upgrade to the latest versions etc...).

Ideally everyone should switch to the webservice version.

This version will NOT be opened sourced since I use some proprietary code in it. The current code of course remains open source.