WARNING: This application can send SMS messages from your phone if you install it onto your phone, which can cost you money. Through various stages of its development, it has been guilty of generating a continuous stream of SMS messages until it was forcefully stopped. The state of this code is in constant development, and cannot be trusted for real-time appilcations. That goes double if not triple for any non-master branch. Thank you for your attention.
Ersatz is an automatic responder for SMS messages. The primary feature of ersatz is the ability to only respond to certain people with potentially tailored messages. There is also support for some basic templates, including an open maps integration. However, ersatz is nearly always in an unstable state, so it's best not to rely on it actually working.
The most recent change to ersatz gave it a dependency on thedroid, but it hasn't otherwise been updated in quite a long time. Also, the user interface is appalling, and prevents me from using it as much as I would otherwise. Aside from uncertainly about the library dependency, the functionality of ersatz mostly seems to work ... but the user interface must be fixed for it to have any usability.
ersatz depends on the thedroid project. It expects to find it locally when generating the ant build for the mobile device. The relative location of the thedroid library is specified in the file ant.properties.
# Note, you will need to change this to the location of the thedroid library on your system relative to this file.
android.library.reference.1=../libs/thedroid
Installing ersatz requires the Android SDK with the android executable on the path. Inside your ersatz checkout directory, type:
android update project --path .
This will generate the local.properties and proguard configuration required. The android update project command also provides you with other project configuration options, such as the target Android OS. For a full list of configuration options, consult the Android Developer Documentation.
ersatz has been written to operate on any 2.2 OS of Android (Froyo). However, it is possible to build ersatz for a different target OS. As mentioned above, using android update project is the approach to specify the target OS. In order to see a list of OS that your Android tools currently support, type:
android list targets
The output of this will provide each supported OS with an id. This id should be specified as the value for the --target parameter in the android update project command. E.g.
android update project --path . --target android-8
If you have correctly linked to the thedroid library as shown above and configured your project correctly, then installation 'should' proceed. Installation and deployment to your system (connected device or running emulator) is achieved through the ant build tools. Specifically:
ant debug install
Generating a build requires all involved projects to have a valid build script. If this is not the case, you will commonly see this error:
sdk.dir is missing. Make sure to generate local.properties using 'android update project' or to inject it through an env var
This error can occur for either ersatz itself, or any dependent projects (such as thedroid). As the error message suggests, the solution is to execute android update project with the relevant parameters for the problem project. A full guide to updating projects via the command line can be found here.