The newest version of SMS Auto Reply now has logging to Outlook.

New calls or SMS messages that come in will be added to Pocket Outlook as a 5 minute appointment with the name and phone number of the contact.

Here’s a link to download SMS Auto reply v1.1.

The free version will still run for 30 minutes, at which time it will stop responding to incoming calls or messages.

As always, my products are released as DonationWare. If you like the product and it represents a good value to you, send a $20 donation. I think you’ll see that compared to other products which do similar tasks, this is competitively priced.

As a side note, I’ll admit that I haven’t given enough thought to how to handle upgrade scenarios for those people who have already paid for a v1.0 version. What I am leaning towards right now is giving one year of free upgrades within the same major version.

So for $20, you get v1.0-v1.9. A v2.0 release would not be included in free updates.

Another issue right now is that my installer does not handle upgrades. To install v1.1 on a device that already has v1.0, you have to uninstall your previous version.

Unfortunately this means losing all of the custom response configuration data for your contacts, which could be a real pain if you have a lot of contacts. I have to investigate a better way of handling this.

Since I’m also a photographer, and have lost cameras and had cameras stolen from me, I thought this was a really, really awesome site:

http://ifoundyourcamera.blogspot.com/

If you find a camera, upload some photos.

If you lost a camera, go look and see if your photos are there.

Such a simple and brilliant idea. I love it!

By now, if you haven’t seen this you are probably living under a rock, don’t own a TV and don’t participate in any online political discussions.

I have gotten tired of seeing this picture posted all over various political forums as an example of how awful Fox News is. I’m not a huge fan of Fox; in fact I never watch Fox News.

So what did I do? I went and looked for other people posting about this faked image. I was lucky enough to run across this post at Cato which shows the clip that was doctored.

http://www.cato.org/videohighlights/index.php?highlight_id=36

So grabbed the frame, opened up Photoshop and ImageReady, and composited them manually.

It’s immediately evident to any rational person they are the same frame. I hope people will stop using that stupid image.

Politics seems to be one of the most-talked topic nowadays and you’re still not participating? Come on, “the land of the free” is endowed with broadband internet connection to be used for favorable tasks and not merely for downloading and file sharing. Anyway, back to the news image. This is probably one the reasons why the ratings of Fox News have been slipping lately. I mean, a lot of people acknowledge the network’s balanced and fair concept and then something like this comes up.

Tonight I received some inspiration and decided to brush off the old SMS Auto Reply code.

I’ve now made it capable of responding to either incoming calls or SMS messages.

You can also add custom reply messages for anyone in your Pocket Outlook address book.

Because this tool seems useful to a reasonable number of people, I’ve decided to release it as DonationWare just like I did with BT Audio.

The free version works fine, but only 30 minutes at a time. This is enough time, most likely, to get a feel for how the program operates, and maybe enough to get you through a meeting or two.

If you like it enough, use the PayPal button below to send a $20 donation and I’ll send you a registered copy of the program with no limitations.

Note that this application is only built for Windows Mobile Pocket PC edition, due to the requirement for a touchscreen.

It also requires the .NET Compact Framework 2.0, which I do not redistribute with the product, in order to keep the download size small.

Here’s a link to download SMS Auto reply.