GeoDial Calendar Location Dial

GeoDial किसी भी फोन app करने के लिए कैलेंडर के स्थान फ़ील्ड से फोन नंबर भेजता है

GeoDial helps you send phone numbers stored in the Location field of the Calendar to Phone, Skype, or any other phone app. Calendar dial so to speak. It will automatically convert any pause or wait characters such as x, p, or w in the number into corresponding codes that are recognized by the phone. Surprisingly, depending on your phone model, dialling group calls stored in your corporate calendar might be challenging.

This app is as simple as possible. Starting with version 2.0 it provides dial pad, where numbers are broken into parts separated by pause, so that you can change the number coming from Calendar or other app.

If the origin app separates phone number into parts, you can click first, then without closing GeoDial, switch back to the app and click second part, etc. GeoDial will arrange the parts appropriately. Again, starting with version 2.0 it offers capability to save number as a contact by pressing contacts button at the bottom.

This is an Open Source application and the source code is available at: https://github.com/sashavasko/GeoDial.

The need for this app arose when I got my new Samsung Galaxy S4 Active and connected to my corporate e-mail and calendar using Microsoft Exchange Sync. It turned out that the phone numbers where all stored in Location fields of the calendar entries. So when I tried to dial the conference call,instead of a phone dialler I got prompted to open google maps to handle the location. The only way I could dial the conference call was to manually re-enter the number into the dialler. Quite inconvenient.

Turns out that the calendar that comes with Samsung Galaxy S4 Active is coded to issue a geo: intent, whenever Location field is clicked, which naturally is handled by Google maps. So I wrote this little application. It register itself as a target for geo: (starting with version 2.0 also tel:) intents. When the intent is issued, the app is one of the few to be offered to the user as the target. If user selects GeoDial as the application to handle the intent, GeoDial will check if the data in the intent looks like a phone number, and if so, it will forward it to phone number dialler, by issuing a CALL intent. Otherwise it will prompt for an actual location aware application, such as Google Maps.

It is generally safe to set GeoDial as the default application for geo: and tel: intents.

Another useful functionality is that it will recognize special characters in the phone number, such as x, p, w etc, and it will reformat the phone number in the way recognizable by the standard android phone dialler. This is useful as different organizations, corporations and institutions have different internal standards for entering conference call numbers. As the result, often times conference call authorization numbers and passwords, as well as extensions have to be entered manually when GeoDial is not used.