Email to SMS

Trying to figure out how to email a grocery list to our street team, we ran across this list of major US cell phone providers and how to format emails to send text messages:

Provider Email Format
Alltel: {number}@message.alltel.com
AT&T: {number}@mms.att.net
Nextel: {number}@messaging.nextel.com
Sprint: {number}@messaging.sprintpcs.com
Suncom: {number}@tms.suncom.com
T-mobile: {number}@tmomail.net
Voicestream: {number}@voicestream.net
Verizon (text only): {number}@vtext.com
Verizon (pics and vids): {number}@vzwpix.com

Replace the {number} with the 10 digit phone number of our recipient and now we can hand down our directives to the street team without ever picking up the cellie. Booyah!

GAX

UPDATE 2010.05.31: GAX was found to harbor a Trojan in the latest release from Dolphiq.

We’ve been using the Microfox screen ruler and screen loupe for doing pixel-perfect web design work for the past few years. It is definitely a very handy tool. But what about when you need to sample a color from a web page? Use the old ALT + “Prnt Scrn” button, paste it into a new Photoshop document, use the Color Picker to sample the image and get our hex value. There’s got to be a better way, right? What if there was a tool that had a screen ruler, a screen loupe, a resizable screen capture and a color picker, all in one? Check out GAX Reloaded from Dophiq Software Development. After using the software for a couple months, we don’t know how we ever got by without it. The good news is that it’s free! The bad news is that it’s only for Windows.  :(

Apply Dynamic Style to a Class

We recently needed to create an HTML page and dynamically hide/show an entire class of <div> tags that were interspersed throughout the page. Using the getElementsByTagName javascript method, we were able to iterate over all of the <div> elements in the document. Then check the CSS class by accessing the className DOM element:

oDivs = document.getElementsByTagName ( “div” );
for ( d = 0;  d < oDivs.length;  d++ ) {

// cl_name = oDivs[ d ].getAttribute ( “class” ); // does NOT work in IE
cl_name = oDivs[ d ].className;
if ( cl_name == “bio” ) {

oDivs[ d ].style.display = “none”;

}

}

Note that the getAttribute method does not work in IE since class is a reserved word for IE. Took us a little while to figure that one out.

HttpFox

Recently we had to troubleshoot an Internet Explorer problem with a force download ASPX script. The download script was being called from a Flash movie. After the call to the download script, all outgoing Javascript calls from Flash were either loading in the Address Bar and not being executed as Javascript (IE6) or were throwing errors (IE7).

It was a black box situation where we only had HTTP access to the server. We needed to examine the HTTP headers to determine if they were a contributing factor to the issue. But how? We found this clever Firefox Add-on that did the trick: HttpFox

Postie

We just found a really neat-o plug-in for WordPress called “Postie”. It enables you to send email messages that get posted to your blog. Any video or image attachments are also included in the post. We tried sending snapshots from our cellphone to Postie and it works like a charm. Check it out here: postie.economysizegeek.com