Have you ever wanted to give someone a quick message, but had a hard time thinking of what to say? Heard a cool song online you want your friend to hear, but they're not around a computer? Wanted to tell someone something personal, but didn't want to have an actual conversation? It happens to everyone! With SendThoughts, forget about a lot of those problems, and just get to the point with being able to connect with someone. Be it a quick text message, or a personal voice clip you want to leave them. SendThoughts makes communication easy, cool, and is available COMPLETELY FREE. Check it out, and if you like it, spread it amongst your friends and make sure you like the pages!
Sending Messages
Do you want to let someone know you care about them but just don't have the time to write out a proper message? Want to remind someone you're thinking of them? Or maybe you just want to brighten up their day without having to fully plan out a thought. We all overthink messages. It's tough to know exactly what to say. So don't! Let SendThoughts do the thinking for you.
You have a lot to do - you are a busy person, of course - so I'll keep this short. Basically, just write the person's name who'll receive the message, their number, what type of message you want to send, and if you want, your name so they know who is the awesome person writing them. You don't have to write your name, and if blank, it'll be an anonymous message - which is pretty cool, too. You won't actually see what you send, it's a surprise within the category that the recipient will see, and them alone ;)
Sending Songs
Ever called someone with a song blasting in the background just so they can hear it? Well, now you don't have to do that! Just give SendThoughts the link to the song on the internet, and your buddy's information, and when they pick up the call, your song will be playing for them! Now, these songs are not stored on my server, so make sure the link works or else they'll get this bad "something bad happened" voice :/
You can also choose to send an additional text to the person with a code so they can hear this song whenever they want! They just have to call SendThoughts back, enter the code they get and they can relive the perfect song you sent them a couple of minutes ago. Because of the way Twilio works with playing media, it actually sounds better and better the more times you hear it, so if you get a call and don't think it sounds too great, call back and try again, I promise it'll sound better.
Sending Voice Clips
I hate how voicemail is set up in the world. We know what it is... why do we have to always listen to the "You have just called..." script? It makes the average call that much longer, and by the time you finally do hear that beep, interest in leaving the message is gone! That is, if you even get that far. But what you want to say is personal, I get it. It's not right for a text, and you have something you want the person to hear. If only there was a way that...
But there is! SendThoughts lets you record a clip, which will then be sent to the chosen receiver so that when they pick up their call, your message will play. It will help you get out of pesky situations, and that way you can get your point across without any sort of interruption by them. It works great for agruments! Like the song feature, you can choose to also send the person a text, with information on how to hear the message whenever they want. So make sure you say something that you will want them to hear over and over... otherwise it won't be great for arguments
Donate to SendThoughts
SendThoughts is free. However, the stuff used to make this project is not. Because I chose to use Twilio in such a different way, and offering the service for free, I personally deal with the server costs, communication costs, and more. I want this to continue to be free because I think it's a neat idea. If you'd like to donate to SendThoughts and other projects I will make, I would greatly appreciate it. If not, then that's cool, too; I just hope you enjoy it. But if you would, here's a Paypal button - you don't need to be a paypall member to donate. I'll love you forever and ever. Seriously, though, I'll list you as a supporter and credit you in LabCoder :)
Things Used
Tech
How it's Used
I used Twilio to pretty much do everything. I used TwiML to generate SMS texts and calling features, accept calls, generate voice urls, play media, and much more. The coolest thing I did with it was the recording feature. Unlike most recording plugins you'll find for web browsers, Twilio was used for mine. I created a client that will call itself if chosen, then running some scripts will return the url of the recording, which is then sent to some other pages which play the recordings for the recipient of your message. It may all sound a bit convoluted, and some it is, but I think it's a cool feature that a lot of people should look into. Essentially, it's voicemail without all the things that make you hate voicemail and make messaging fun. I also used Twilio and the Twilio Client because I wanted to participate in their end-of-the-year Rube Goldberg hackathon, where you try to make simple things in weird out-of-the-box ways. Hopefully I did that. I'm releasing the recording potion of this app for free on my GitHub.
MongoDB is an amazing no-sql solution. I had such a problem getting this to work because this runs on a shared server, but it was worth it. I could have used MySQL but I chose not to because in the future as this app hopefully expands, I don't want to break old models just because they were based on a fixed schema. I think everyone should at least try it out, because it's pretty simple to use and just makes sense. I hear it scales well, too. My data hasn't gotten that large to test it yet, but we'll see.
JQuery is almost an essential library these days for websites. How could I not use it? That nice carousel-ish form layout up there (which the app is completely dependent on) runs on a loop slider plugin for jquery. And it's used in bunch of places, I guess. But in the end... it's just JQuery.
This is a PHP app, so I'm using its full functionality for a bunch of things you probably don't care about, do you? For one, I use the Twilio PHP wrapper library for its REST protocol. It's also handy for quick database connections. PHP is fun, but you can definitely run into some pitfalls in coding it. I made some hacks here and there to get this app working properly. Maybe I should try another framework next time. I hear Ruby's nice...
