I think Arist a YC company is an SMS education platform.
Ask HN: Is there a pure SMS based UI?
71–80 of 122 posts
Re: Ask HN: Is there a pure SMS based UI?
#72This presentation by an engineer from Wave (African fintech) shows how they used SMS and other tricks for zones without internet: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EAxnA9L5rS8
This is interesting - thanks! Two of my CS lecturers at university were involved in setting up/improving networks across Africa and they had great stories to tell about that.
A LOT of stuff happens via USSD codes and SMS.
Re: Ask HN: Is there a pure SMS based UI?
#73Not that this is a solution for you now, but about 10-15 years ago there were a whole slew of SMS services which were super useful for those without data. Google 311 (EDIT: actually it was Google 411) let you conduct full searches, local listings, full text turn-by-turn navigation, weather, movie listings etc. You could also call a number and do an voice search that would text you back the results. Twitter, AIM, Face…
Uber as well. In fact, for the first year or so I used Uber, I never downloaded the app, just did SMS.
Re: Ask HN: Is there a pure SMS based UI?
#74What you want if your comms layer supports it is this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unstructured_Supplementary_Ser... It works on dumb phones and is extremely lightweight. Think of it as connection based SMS. Very popular in places with low connectivity.
You can’t use it for your own applications willy nilly, though. You have to talk to the sms center of your comms operator, and that comes with costs and infrastructure to set up.
Re: Ask HN: Is there a pure SMS based UI?
#75IP packets contain 20 bytes of headers, the rest is data. Theoretically you could create the world's worst VPN by stuffing the 140 bytes of an SMS absolutely full of binary data, with some compression of course. So I went looking for "IP over SMS" and actually found this: https://github.com/spandanb/ipos but it's for web browsers only. This old HN thread talks about the same concept: https://news.ycombinator.com/item…
That is nice but with 'unlimited' SMS will probably get you throttled quickly. I think OP might be better off with custom SMS integrations, lets say an RSS to SMS notification service for their fav news site that would send the article titles as individual sms messages and would allow requesting the 'full' article by means of an SMS reply
I know Twilio has a nice SDK for building solutions like that
Re: Ask HN: Is there a pure SMS based UI?
#76Not that this is a solution for you now, but about 10-15 years ago there were a whole slew of SMS services which were super useful for those without data. Google 311 (EDIT: actually it was Google 411) let you conduct full searches, local listings, full text turn-by-turn navigation, weather, movie listings etc. You could also call a number and do an voice search that would text you back the results. Twitter, AIM, Face…
My grandfather used SMS to get weather & sports updates for years. He still isn't on the Internet and honestly would love to still use SMS.
Re: Ask HN: Is there a pure SMS based UI?
#77IP packets contain 20 bytes of headers, the rest is data. Theoretically you could create the world's worst VPN by stuffing the 140 bytes of an SMS absolutely full of binary data, with some compression of course. So I went looking for "IP over SMS" and actually found this: https://github.com/spandanb/ipos but it's for web browsers only. This old HN thread talks about the same concept: https://news.ycombinator.com/item…
That is nice but with 'unlimited' SMS will probably get you throttled quickly. I think OP might be better off with custom SMS integrations, lets say an RSS to SMS notification service for their fav news site that would send the article titles as individual sms messages and would allow requesting the 'full' article by means of an SMS reply I know Twilio has a nice SDK for building solutions like that
Person to Person SMS is supposed to average below 1 message per minute. Different carriers will throttle your messages in different ways.
Re: Ask HN: Is there a pure SMS based UI?
#78I update my own site/blog/journal with a sms-only service I set up: https://textpost.me
Re: Ask HN: Is there a pure SMS based UI?
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is crazy that I stumbled upon this post, I just learned about HackerNews today and saw this on the front page! I've been working on making a sort of revival project of Cosmos browser for a couple months now using a custom encoding and better compression. With the GSM 03.38 spec, I found there are 125 usable characters that I could use as a custom base, but I found out that for some reason the 0x10 column of the…
That's awesome - feel free to email me (should be on my website) if you want to talk more. Can share some tips and tricks or answer questions you might have.
Thanks, I'll be in touch.
Re: Ask HN: Is there a pure SMS based UI?
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is crazy that I stumbled upon this post, I just learned about HackerNews today and saw this on the front page! I've been working on making a sort of revival project of Cosmos browser for a couple months now using a custom encoding and better compression. With the GSM 03.38 spec, I found there are 125 usable characters that I could use as a custom base, but I found out that for some reason the 0x10 column of the…
This is a great, ambitious, but doable project for a first year CS student. You should put up a github repo when you're done, regardless of how you feel about the way the code looks. It will absolutely help during a job search.
I appreciate the comment - at first I wasn't sure if it was too ambitious, but once I realized that Android has libraries for parsing HTML and a documented way to send and receive texts, it was more manageable. It was also nice that ColdSauce had created something that I could use as a reference so I wasn't going in blind. I definitely plan on putting up a repo, probably within the next couple weeks. Going into this project I realized there's a lot more potential and the open source community would be beneficial to help expand the scope of this project!