Wednesday, February 14, 2007

Cingular Minutes Minder 1.0

After much anticipation (by approximately 7 people) the official family plan supported version is here! I'm pretty excited about this release not only because it's the thing most people wanted, but I was also able to squeeze in a couple other things that I've been wanting to get in there too.


So, first things first, the family plan support. This shouldn't be too big of a deal, it should just work. Type in your number and password and voila, it should display the number of shared minutes remaining. Keep in mind, the minutes information is for the group plan, but the data information is by the person. As far as I know, Cingular's website only provides data information by the person.

Second new thing, billing cycle date. For those of us that have problems remembering when their minutes get reset, it's easy to find now. Just hover over the extension and it'll tell you how much longer you have until those blessed minutes get reset :-).

Third, low minutes warning. Don't worry, nothing obnoxious like an alert popping up every time you open a window. The remaining minutes will simply change to red when you have less than 10% of your minutes left, hopefully that'll catch your eye while you're yapping to Aunt Sarah (sorry, it's dinner time and I'm starving).

Last, but certainly not least, I begrudgingly added support for people with an additional passcode on their account :-). My buddy Drew graciously let me borrow his account to get the family plan support working, but he has additional security so I had to make that work.

That's all she wrote, I hope everything works as advertised.

Known Issues

There are a couple things I know are issues that I want people to keep in mind.

1) Changing phone numbers and passwords. If you try to change your number in the extensions preferences and it doesn't seem to work, go into the firefox preferences and remove the saved entry for "http://minuteminder.cingular.com." For a little bit of help with this check out this site. Note, you don't need to clear all your passwords, just the one.

2) This is similar to the first point. If you're using an additional passcode and you mistype it, the extension doesn't prompt you for it again, at least not necessarily. Your best bet is to go into Firefox's preferences and delete that entry.

3) Right now, the extension only really applies to each window separately. So, when you refresh it on one window, it is not refreshed on all the windows. This has always been the case, but I thought I'd make sure everyone knows about it to hopefully save any confusion.

Let me know if there is anything else: cingularminutes AT gmail