A couple of weeks ago I released a new version of my FreeSMS gadget. The most important new feature is better support for contacts. The gadget now downloads any contacts stored online at www.ung1881.no. Another problem with the previous release was that it only read your Vista contacts when the gadget loaded (on start up). There was no way to refresh the contact list with out removing/adding the gadget to your Sidebar. If you did this you had to enter your username and password again, and the user experience wasn't very nice. The 1.5 release reads your Ung1881 and Vista contacts when ever you access the settings page (I didn't want to start a timer, or to have a button to do this). You just click settings and then click OK to load your contacts.

I’m working on a 2.0 release with some more new features. This release will probably be aligned with the Norwegian Gadget Competition 2007 (voting starts in the beginning of November). Some of the things I’m working on is support for multiple skins (the default skin takes up to much space on your sidebar), support for Outlook contacts, and support to explicitly mark where the add starts (the underlying SMS service ads a short ad on the end of every message).

The gadget now has more than 9500 downloads (!) which makes it the most popular Norwegian gadget on the Vista Gadget gallery. Hopefully you’ll take time to vote for the gadget then the competition voting starts… Feel free to post any comments, questions or suggestions.