Cingular Minutes Minder Firefox Extension

Sadly

2009-11-18T11:07:00.003-05:00

Unfortunately, life has overtaken my ability and desire to keep up with this extension. I keep telling myself I'll update it, but obviously I haven't. So, at least for the time being I'm disappointed to say that this extension is no longer being supported.

Keeping You Posted

2008-01-17T08:20:00.000-05:00

I'm happy to be able to say that I've been working on the extension and made some progress, but unfortunately I've run into some security issues. So, I'm trying to get in touch with someone at AT&T that might be able to address the issue with me, but it's not quite there yet. Sorry for the delay and thanks for you patience. I haven't totally forgotten about you all, hopefully it'll be back up and running soon.

These Aren't The Minutes You're Looking For...

2007-06-20T11:00:00.000-04:00

It turns out the minutes I'm displaying for Family Plans aren't the minutes y'all are interested in. That said, "Sorry." I had intended to make the Family Plan display a bit more intricate, we'll just consider this motivation to speed that up.

AT&T Minutes Minder v0.0.3

2007-06-19T15:02:00.002-04:00

Funny how fast things change. Turns out I'm a better programmer than I thought. Go ahead and give this version a whirl, it should work fully.

AT&T Minutes Minder v0.0.3

P.S. If you get prompted to upgrade to "v0.5" do not install it. We're having trouble with addons.mozilla.org feeding out the wrong information. These new releases with the "AT&T" name should be entirely different extensions with different IDs but the site seems confused.

Thanks for the responses

2007-06-19T14:12:00.000-04:00

For those with Family Plans please keep submitting HTML and screenshots to me (don't forget to hide personal information you don't want me to see), then if I were you I'd go ahead and take a week and curse our names. I doubt I'll have a fix for y'all within the next week. I'm going to re-write the plugin to support a file input so I can parse what users have submitted, then I'm going to see what I can pull off. I've been sent three samples and all three are different. Given the lack of uniformity this could be quite entertaining, but I'm also certain there's a reason for the discrepancies that may not matter.

Either way, I'll keep you informed.

Calling All Family Plans (again)

2007-06-19T11:42:00.000-04:00

Matt and I, being single, are not a part of any family plans*. As such, I cannot access and view the HTML on their website in order to make this extension work. All previously submitted HTML files are not useful because of the changes AT&T has made. Because of this we have to make a "call for help" again.

If you have a family plan and would like this to work please do us a large favor: log into AT&T's website, save the HTML from the page that displays your minutes, then click on "Data" and save the information from that page as well. If you are worried about your privacy you can edit the HTML (open in notepad and do a find/replace) to take out/change your name/number/etc. But realize we don't exactly send this information around going "hey look at how much this person talks on the phone!"

You can email me at attminutesminder@gmail.com (see how speedy we're being with the name brand changes?)

* Matt, maybe we should see if they do some sort of hetero-lifemate thing and score ourselves a discount?

AT&T Minutes Minder v0.0.2

2007-06-18T23:44:00.001-04:00

Kind of starting over again with the version numbers given that we've had to rewrite some of the code to accomodate the new output of AT&T's webpages. The current release does not support family plans but should work fine otherwise:

http://stevegula.net/amm/attminuteminder-0.0.2.xpi

Timelines

2007-06-13T20:12:00.001-04:00

I'm not positive you literally learn something new every day. For instance, the day in college I spent watching episode after episode of Seinfeld that I'd already seen may not have produced much fruit. But, I am learning the importance of monitoring deadlines you make for yourself in public forums...much like this one. Wow, I didn't realize it's already been a solid 3 weeks since I said I'd have it fixed soon. Mea culpa. So, I guess instead of promising to have it done by ________, I'll just try to keep you posted on what is going on.

1) I haven't really touched it at all.
2) The only interaction I had with the extension was to explain a bit of its ridiculousness to my buddy rdg, who you might see commenting here and there.
3) rdg has become cooler than I am because he's actually working it

It's been a while

2007-05-21T10:14:00.000-04:00

I haven't updated in a while because everything seemed to be going well. Unfortunately, it looks like something changed on Cingular's (AT&T now I guess) end around the end of last week. I was hoping it was just a temporary hiccup that would right itself, but it's been broken for a few days so I need to take a look at it. So, just in the way of estimates, I probably won't get to look at it until the middle of this week or so. I also realized that I managed to forget to put the 1.0 version of the extension onto the official Mozilla add-ons site, so I'll do that when I get it working again.

Short of the long, keep an eye out at the end of this week for an update, hopefully I'll have something by then.

Cingular Minutes Minder 1.0

2007-02-14T18:39:00.000-05:00

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

2007-02-14T18:35:00.000-05:00

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

Thanks For The Help

2007-01-31T17:37:00.000-05:00

Thanks to the folks who were helpful enough to send me the information for family plans. I'll be sending them an early copy of the family plan version to make sure everything is working as I expect. I'm happy with the way it's progressing and hope to have it out there for you all pretty soon.

Calling All Family Plans

2007-01-16T22:21:00.000-05:00

So, I'm going to start working on the Family Plan portion of the extension. As the most requested feature hopefully I can get it done quickly. To get this done, I need a few kind souls to feed me some information about family plans. I have no family with which to plan, so I don't get to see that page when I log into Cingular's website. I need some folks to log into Cingular as they normally would, but then, once the page has fully loaded, go up to File->Save Page As... to save it to your computer. Then zip up all that information and send it to me at cingularminutes _AT_ gmail. I'd really appreciate the help.

No News is Good News

2006-12-06T15:04:00.000-05:00

I haven't heard much screaming about the new release, so I'm assuming that's a good sign. Hopefully everyone is happily checking their SMS/Text messages as they go. Here's to finishing grad school in a week and getting started on Family/Group plans.

Cingular Minutes Minder 0.5

2006-12-02T09:41:00.000-05:00

Well version numbers don't really mean anything, but I'm halfway to a 1.0 release! I think I'm actually a lot closer than that. I've gotten pretty much everything done that I had hoped to have done. My two main goals were to create a solid extension that works for the majority of people and to get it up on the official addons site. I've acheived both of those goals with this bug fix release.

This release should fix the SMS/text messaging problem people where having, someone let me know it's working for them. Thanks to Steve for finding and fixing the bug for me. Also, I've increased the automatic check time of the extension to 1 hour. I don't want the extension bombarding Cingular and they really don't update their information more often than that anyway. Let me know how this one works for you.

Question and Answers

2006-11-06T22:22:00.000-05:00

A couple of folks took the time to IM me this evening through the meebome widget, but unfortunately I was watching Hero and didn't see the IMs. On a sidenote, Hero and I are forming a Lost-like love/hate relationship, the cliff hanger every week is killing me I'm going to have to stop watching until the DVDs come out. But that isn't the point is it.

The first question was:
"All i get is the number of text message[s]. Is there a way to show how many minutes are left?"

The quick answer is yup, there is. The long answer is there are two ways to do that. First, if you move your mouse over the extension and leave it there for a few seconds a display will come up with more detailed information about your account, including the remaining anytime minutes for the month. The other option is to right-click on the extension and go to the Preferences. Once you get there, choose "Minutes" from the "Display in status bar" drop down. Once the extension is refreshed your minutes should be displayed.

The second question was:
"...having a problem with it not refreshing w/ the new/correct info..."
The reason for this is that the extension will only check automatically once every 10 minutes so we don't bombard Cingular with unnecessary requests. If you want it to update right when you look at it, you can right-click on the extension and choose "Refresh." That will force it to refresh and ignore the lastChecked date.

Hope that helps, post up if that did (or didn't) answer you questions. Sorry I missed you.

All in the Family (Plan)

2006-11-03T07:28:00.000-05:00

I've had a number of people post comments and email me directly asking about support for family plans. Given the number of people asking about it, I'm going to make it one of the top 2 or 3 things I do when I start working on new features again (January). Which means, if it can be done reasonably, it'll get done.

In the meantime, I'd love some ideas from you guys about how the display of family plans would go. Would that be a third option in the prefs (anytime, text, family)? Would you like to see something like 243 Anytime Minutes Remaining/562 Family Plan Minutes Remaining (243/562 in non-verbose mode)? Those are my first two thoughts. I don't have a family, you know orphaned at 3 and all (not true even a little, I have a hugely supportive Mom and Dad, and a brother who's alright too). But I do not have a family plan. So, your suggestions for the usability would go a long way.

Lifehackers

2006-11-02T19:12:00.000-05:00

Thanks to the folks over at Lifehacker for the post today. I've been reading Lifehacker for a while now and always like to see the tips and tricks they suggest. I took a peep at my site stats this afternoon and was shocked to see quite a spike from the 10-20 hits a day I usually get. Thanks for coming by Lifehackers, let me know if you see something you like :-).

Cingular's Website

2006-11-01T14:20:00.000-05:00

I can't log in to Cingular's website. When I try to, it kicks me back to the login screen without an error message. So, if you're getting the "Could not login to Cingular" message from the extension check Cingular's website to see what's going on there.

Anyone else having the same login problems or is it just me?

Gotta Love Great Users

2006-10-28T01:25:00.000-04:00

A huge thank you goes out to Anonymous. I tell you what, this guy gives me all sorts of great feedback with bugs and feature requests. Tonight he put his best foot forward and put out the bug fix before I'd even had a chance to look at it. Seriously, that was a great comment to see, I do appreciate you posting that. I've updated the extension and uploaded it to the site. It takes about 8 hours for the mirrors to pick it up so it should be ready for everyone Saturday morning sometime.

Thanks again Anonymous, look forward to more posts from you.

Login Changed

2006-10-22T16:12:00.000-04:00

Hey everyone, Cingular changed their login process a little bit so that breaks the extension of course. This would be much easier if they'd just provide a little API to call but they don't. So I'm going to have to touch it up a little to get it working, check back in a few days for the update.

Cingular Minutes Minder 0.4.3

2006-09-28T23:28:00.000-04:00

Just a small release to update the maxVersion again with the new Firefox coming out. I also threw in some transparent .pngs for the images.

Changing gears

2006-09-18T19:37:00.000-04:00

It's probably poor form to comment, but google finally indexed this little site here and I'm kind of excited about it. It's good timing as the 0.4.2 release is really the one I'm most confident in so far. At the same time, I have the extension submitted to mozilla's addon site so hopefully that will go through in a week or so.

I've been working on rewriting the underlying javascript. The code is actually a bit embarrassing, but functional, the way it is. Random methods everywhere with no concept of object-orientedness or cohesion throughout the code. That's alright though, generally speaking it works. The next update will probably include some changes to the statusbar popup menu and the preferences screen. Sadly, grad school started up about two weeks ago (notice the last post date) and I've become increasingly busy so that update will take a little more time to get done than before.

As always I'd really appreciate any feedback. If you don't know what sort of things to tell me, just drop me a line telling me that you'd be happy to talk and I can throw you some questions that would really help me out.

Cingular Minutes Minder 0.4.2

2006-09-08T23:10:00.000-04:00

Corrected the maxVersion to 2.0b2 so that the Firefox Extensions site would take it for submission. On that note, I submitted it for the official site, so hopefully it will be approved soon and be hosted correctly. It can take a couple weeks to be reviewed though, so patience reins. Here's the new link to Cingular Minutes Minder version 0.4.2.

Goals For 1.0

2006-09-08T00:04:00.000-04:00

I think the extension is getting closer to the point of calling it a 1.0 release. I wanted to document the things that I'm looking for before this becomes a full release. This is mostly just so I have them documented somewhere, but I think you might find the direction of the extension interesting too. Feel free to suggest things.

Listed on addons.mozilla.com

Extension should "just work"

Get error tooltip working

Cleanup Preferences Dialog

Some future improvements are:

Handle group plans better

Redo preferences to the <preference> element

Status bar days remaining in the billing cycle (not sure how this will look)

Optional account info displayed in tooltip

Change tooltip to drawer off the statusbar

Questions? Comments? Suggestions?

2006-09-07T23:47:00.000-04:00

I just wanted an official post about this. There are two ways to get me and doing both is the best option. If not both then just the second. But you know, do whatever you want.

1) Post a comment to this or any other thread.
2) Email me at cingularminutes _AT_ gmail _DOT_ com (fill out _AT_ and _DOT_ with the appropriate punctuation).

Like I said, I'd love it if people would do both. The better of the two though is emailing me because then I can get back in contact with you directly to follow up.

Look forward to hearing from you.

Cingular Minutes Minder 0.4.1

2006-09-07T18:58:00.000-04:00

Dave brought up a good point that my extension doesn't support Firefox 2.0 (beta). I'm actually not using it yet, but that doesn't mean no one else should. So, I updated the extension to allow it to be installed for Firefox 2.0. Here's Cingular Minutes Minder version 0.4.1. All that changed is the maxVersion set for the extension, shouldn't change functionality at all.

Cingular Minutes Minder 0.4

2006-09-07T17:00:00.000-04:00

With little fanfare I dropped Cingular Minutes Minder version 0.4 out into the world a couple nights ago. I was actually a little excited about it because I added support for text messages. So now the last item in the tooltip should be your remaining text messages. In the preferences, you can choose to display your remaining text messages in the status bar instead of your remaining anytime minutes.

Cingular Minutes Minder 0.3.1

2006-09-01T07:53:00.000-04:00

Doesn't look like Cingular made any structural changes to their website, so everything seems to still be working. As promised I've got an update that will fix problems for people that are on group plans. Check out version 0.3.1.

Changes...

2006-08-31T23:37:00.000-04:00

Well, it's always nice to know that the company you're using is trying to improve itself, but this is starting to get a little annoying. It seems like about once a month Cingular has brought down it's main website for improvements and changes. We'll see what happens tomorrow when they bring their site back online, hopefully the changes aren't too big of a deal.

I actually have a fix ready to go for people that have group plans. The extension was having trouble finding the correct table to read when a user in a group plan logged in. I think I've solved that problem, but I don't want to release it until I can verify that I didn't break anything that was already working. Plus, nothing will work until Cingular's site is up and running again.

Although I am going to send to the guy, who shall remain nameless, that sent me some more info about how it wasn't working for him. Thanks again for taking the time to give me feedback.

Tale of Two (or more?) Cingulars

2006-08-28T20:55:00.000-04:00

It's come to my attention that my extension will not work for everyone. This is not a shock, but now I actually have one concrete reason why. Thanks to JJ for sending me some more information. It turns out that cingular doesn't have all of their users on the same page, quite literally. Looking at JJ's screenshot, I realized that Cingular still lets AT&T users login to the old AT&T system. When I first started working on this extension I was still logging into AT&T's website through Cingular using this address: http://www.cingular.com/ocs. Just as I had the extension in a usable form, Cingular migrated me to their system: http://www.cingular.com and the extension was ruined. As reference, this is what the minutes section of the old AT&T page looks like:

transition message:

vs new:

So, I figured they migrated everyone to the new website. Since then I've completely reworked the extension and am not even sure I have a copy of the old one around. Even if I did, it certainly wouldn't plug right in. Now, I'm interested to see how many old AT&T users are still able to login to the old website or if most everyone has been transitioned. Unfortunately at this point, my extension won't work with the old website, but depending on demand that may be remedied.

I'd also really like to hear from anyone who's had the extension working properly.

Cingular Minutes Minder 0.3

2006-08-28T17:39:00.000-04:00

Version 0.3 is out today. Some of the things it fixes are:
- formatting the tooltip table
- better error handling
- better initial login process

The biggest change is that this one might actually work for someone other than me. Although, to disuade too much enthusiasm, I've already had a couple people tell me that it hasn't worked for them.

If anyone is feeling in a giving sort of mood, I could really use some feedback about how it's working (or not) for you. The information I need is this:
- The page source of the first page you get after you login to cingular.com. Meaning, login to Cingular.com like you normally would. When you get to that page, hit ctrl+u and a window with HTML should come up. Copy all of that HTML and send it to me.
- What kind of account you have. Have you always been a cingular customer? AT&T customer transferred to cingular?
- The link that you go to when you login to the website. ("www.cingular.com", "www.cingular.com/ocs", "onlinecare.cingular.com", etc)
- If possible, a screenshot of the first page you get after you login. This will help me match up the HTML you sent me to what you see when you're logged in the website.

Hope it works for someone else.

Just to prove I'm not making this up, here's version 0.3 in action :-).

Cingular Minutes Minder 0.2.1

2006-08-21T00:21:00.000-04:00

Minor revision this time. The extension now checks your minutes automatically when a new Firefox window is opened. It only checks once a day though. I might change the frequency if I figure out how often the website updates. If anyone knows what that is, let me know.

Cingular Minutes Minder 0.2

2006-08-20T02:55:00.000-04:00

I posted a link to version 0.2 in the Versions sidebar. I have a project page hosted on mozdev that hosts the cvs repository and the extension releases. If you're interested in looking at the code, obviously you can open up the extension, but you can also check it out from the repository. The cvs repository will have the most recent stuff that I'm working on.

This release has the following fixes:
- tooltip added to display other minute information
- connection error fixed
- preference window updated

Here's a screenshot:

Cingular Minutes Minder Firefox Extension

2006-08-20T00:42:00.000-04:00

Cingular Minutes Minder is a Firefox extension that checks the status of your minutes with Cingular. With a valid online Cingular account, Cingular Minutes Minder checks your minutes and displays the number of remaining "Anytime" minutes in your status bar. The rest of your minute information is displayed as a tool tip when you put your mouse over the extension. The extension stores your login and password information in Firefox's password manager so you only need to enter it once.

I haven't gotten a chance to have anyone but me test it so I really look forward to hearing any comments. There are already a number of things I'd like to do with it, but there's only so much free time.

Also, this extension is totally dependent on Cingular's website, so if there are any changes it could cause the extension to stop working. If that happens I'll probably notice quickly and try to get an update out ASAP but no guarantees.