Thursday, August 13, 2015

LAN SMS

If you just want to download LAN SMS, check here: http://www.eonedgestudios.com/lansms.php

In early 2015, I was working on projects and kept getting annoyed with getting SMS on my phone.  Most of what I do is on a desktop, so always having to check the phone was pretty annoying.  Plus, I always had the sound off, so I never knew when I got messages.  Always love the "I SENT YOU A TEXT 6 HOURS AGO, WTF" scenario.  Of course, sometimes I had to text someone also for whatever, so the quest to find the phone was on regardless.

Initially, I thought, surely there has to be some way to get these text messages on to my computer.  Certainly, I found a couple apps and services out there that did that, but each one did things I definitely didn't like -- had to sign up with another account, had to get a different phone number, had to use Google Hangouts (bleh), or various other things, like use cloud services... I thought, man, why is this so freaking involved, I just want SMS to be forwarded from my freakin` phone to my computer and vice versa.  My phone is right here next to me, but I have to jump through all these hoops to make this happen...

Unhappy with the things out there, I decided to make apps that just did this in a way I wanted, well, with some bells and whistles to make this even more useful, of course.

Enter LAN SMS.  We began Alpha testing it in February of 2015 with some Beta action several months later.  Lots of ideas were implemented and some really great feedback happened, making the product much better than I initially designed it to be.

Below, you can find some of the screencaps over the course of development:

One of the earliest versions of LAN SMS

I insisted we had "tabbed" chats, like how web browsers have tabbed browsing

Our first major UI revamp looked like this.  Some of the connection options were explored, but subsequently dropped from the final product due to various circumstances.

Things started coming together by this point, settings and stuff on the left, major important stuff on the right.

More settings were being added, some tabbed chats were open, things were happening.  We were getting a lot of great feedback from Beta users at this point as well.

Some UI redesign happened and this is what the "final to be released" looked like.  Again, some of the options on the left were dropped before release and may make a come back in the future.

Using the night theme, showing off the settings screen.  What use to be packed on the left side of the screen now gets its own section due to the abundance of options and details.

LAN SMS was released to the public on August 13, 2015.

More information about the product, as well as links to downloads, can be found at: http://www.eonedgestudios.com/lansms.php