A project used to pull the sms records and contact information from the iPhone itunes backup to be used on a mac.
It serves the project files to the browser using Sinatra.
The motivation for this was that I was trying to share a particularly funny and long SMS conversation with a friend on facebook chat,
but I didn't want to type everything in. Also the iPhone doesn't display the exact time texts were sent/received for all texts,
and I'd prefer to have that when sharing the conversation.
Backup your iPhone in itunes (do not check the box to use a password to encrypt your backup -- otherwise the app can't access your files).
execute the command ruby server.rb from the project directory to run the project.
The app will automatically use the newest backup created.
Browse to localhost:4567 to view your sms conversations
Click on a contact to view your message record with them.
Just like on the iPhone, sms messages are displayed in green speech bubbles, and iMessages are displayed in blue speech bubbles.
To view an easily printable or copy/pastable version of the conversation, click on the "Printer Friendly Version" link at the top of the conversation. The printer friendly version is particularly useful if you are trying to copy/paste the conversation to a friend, because it will maintain correct formatting when copied to your clipboard.
Within the project is an awesome set of Models using ActiveRecord to access the iPhone contacts, numbers, messages, etc and associate them. Even though the naming scheme is not standard/preferred by ActiveRecord, the benefits of using ActiveRecord outweigh the slight configuration/fiddling around needed to get the project to work.
By using ActiveRecord I have made the project easily extensible. If, for instanc, I want to find out the names of everyone to whom I messaged a particular dumb joke, that's possible. Or, if I'd like to find out the frequency with which I send messages, to a few members of my family, that's also possible (with some additional supporting code). The point is, using ActiveRecord makes it easier for me to play around with cool features, and I'm happy with the result.
Also, it was a cool way to learn more about ActiveRecord -- I ended up subclassing ActiveRecord::Base because the tables of interest were in two different databases: one for contacts, one for messages.
Another interesting implementation detail- texts and iMessages for the same contact are not all stored under the same number/address value. What I mean by that is, say your friend's cell number is (303) 123-4567 , then his contact information could store the number as (303) 123-4567, +13031234567, or a number of other ways. iMessages always use the standard +13031234567, but some texts may be stored as (303) 123-4567, some as +13031234567 and others as +1(303) 123-4567. It's all a bit messy, but eventually I got it to where all of my texts/iMessages were displaying correctly.
- Can I use this on a PC? The directory structure for itunes backups and itunes location is different on PCs. Eventually I may add support for that, but it's not high on my to-do list.
I'd like to turn it into something that I can deploy to the web for others to use to browse their text conversations online. To that end, I'd like to add the following features:
- Ajaxy search
- Uploadable backups (so people can upload their sms logs and have them parsed/accessible).
- anything else cool I feel like adding!
Original inspiration and the basic CSS -- not the css for the conversation bubbles (which was a pain to get right)- was taken from https://github.com/joshuap/valentine However at this point, there's no code that I reused from his original project aside from the base layout and css.