Thursday, January 25, 2007

Plain Vanilla Directions!!!

I have a relatively simple cell phone which is great for making calls and sending/receiving messages. A lot of times, I copy driving directions from Google or Mapquest, paste it in Textpad, clean it up and then email it to my cell phone. I find its much easier than carrying around a piece of paper and since my phone stores a ton of messages, I can look up the directions whenever the need arises. Its not a very fun task to copy-paste, cleanup and then email, but there are advantages to it.

To counter the drudgery of all that work, I developed this website where you can get the directions in plain text. There is also functionality on the website that allows you to send the directions to your phone as an SMS or a MMS. Give it a try and save a tree :D

Website: http://www.shamikshah.com/code/textDirections.html

Feedback is always welcome :D

UPDATE: I uploaded an older version by mistake, check the site now, there are a few improvements to the UI. I yet need to implement the back-end properly. Presently it uses the normal php mail() function, the next update with use the PEAR Mail package

UPDATE 2: The backend now uses the PEAR Mail package, you will receive the messages from directions at shamikshah dot com