It is June, 2nd 2010 and, as announced, we have now closed the service.
All parts of the WebApp have been completely disabled, and all stored texts permanently deleted.
But… a good news!
An user of ours has bought from us the source code and domain names, and thus the service is going to return online very soon!
This blog will stay online until the site is moved. So stay tuned for more information!
UPDATE – May 18th
As planned, all Import modules have been disabled and all databases are now read-only.When logging in, you will see a new page offering the ability to export messages in various formats: the 2 you were used to (iPhone-compatible database and CSV) and 2 new formats (HTML – the most human-readable, perfect for printing – and JSON – for programmers and advanced users).
Should you encounter any problem with the export module, please reply with a comment to this post.
It has been a long time since we posted last time. And we’re sorry we have now to tell you sad news…
But, that is: YouArchive.It is going to close.
Before going into the reasons, here is a brief summary of the key points, including the timeline:
Archives will become read-only on May 18th, 2010: no more messages can be uploaded after that day.
The site will be completely closed on June 2nd, 2010: all archived texts will be permanently deleted.
The domains (both youarchive.it and itextuploader.com ) are for sale: please contact us if you are interested! (youarchive.it has PR 3 and 850-1000 daily unique visitors, mostly mobile)
It was October 2007 when we got our first iPhones. Of course, as we all live in Italy, we had to get them from the US and unlock them. We ended up with some hacked phones, perfect to play with. Those were the days of iPhone 1.x and no App Store existed: instead, a repository of “gray apps” was coming up.
We thought our iPhones were really cool, but we were really disappointed by the fact that we could store only 1.000 SMS messages at that time. So, we started developing an application that was meant to be an archive for our texts.
At first, YouArchive.It (at the time called iSMS) was meant to be used only internally; we decided to open the service publicly on January 2008.
However, the site did not know a big success until iTextUploader came out in July 15th, 2008. It was a sort of revolution: the site changed its name to YouArchive.It and moved to a new server (actually, we moved it 3 times before we could find a reliable host). 8 days after, on July 23rd the site was already containing 1 milion messages! That was an incredible success for us!
In the following months, many changes were made to the site, which continued to grow every day, thanks to the quality of both our service and technical support.
We started working on the fourth version of the WebApp more than a year ago. It was meant to be a complete rewrite, starting from the user interface. However, some problems then started to come out…
Reasons for our choice are both complicated and various.
First of all, there are personal problems. All developers behind YouArchive.It are basically freelancers, and many things that have been happening in the last years that made us busier and busier.
But, one of the biggest problems is surely represented by Apple. As you might know, they are fighting against jailbreak: on one side, they are trying to stop jailbreakers in any way (by adding new protections and with “psychological terrorism” too!); on the other side, they are legally prosecuting users developing jailbreak tools.
Since we are actively developing App Store apps, then, this is a quite big problem: having an application in Cydia is considered a violation of the contract.
Although these are not the only reasons, I would say they were enough for us to start thinking to the possibility of closing the service. I won’t bore you with the others: they are far less interesting and relevant.
Our first step was to stop accepting donations, a few months ago.
We will make the service read-only on May 18th. On that day, no new messages can be imported. You will, however, be able to download all your data (and you should).
The site will be completely closed on June 2nd. After that moment, all uploaded texts will be permanently deleted.
Since we are closing the site, our domain names youarchive.it and itextuploader.com are for sale.
Please contact us if you are interested.
In particular, youarchive.it has PageRank 3 on Google and an average of 850-1000 unique users every day, mostly from mobile phones (iPhone and iPod Touch in primis).
Apple has just released the firmware 3.0 for the iPhone, and we have been flooded by emails of users asking if iTextUploader can be used with it…
In short, YES.
We have been testing iTextUploader with 3.0 since beta 5, and everything seemed to be working for us.
So, as soon as the iPhone Dev Team releases the official 3.0 jailbreak (which is expected in a few hours), you can safely upgrade your iPhone and use iTextUploader with it!
But that’s not all… Firmware 3.0 included (finally) native MMS support for the iPhone 3G. MMSs can contain photos, sounds, videos and much more, so we will release an update for both iTextUploader and YouArchive.It to fully support them. We are working on it, and we hope we can release it the next month.
Surprisingly, though, iTextUploader 2.5 is already capable of uploading MMS messages if they contain just text!
Oh… I forgot to say just one thing… Expect some big news in the next months! 
We are proud to present iTextUploader 2.5 for iPhone!
This upcoming release will finally include a feature requested by many users: Automatic Upload! This means you won’t need to manually open iTextUploader and upload messages anymore: your iPhone will do that by itself, while it is in your pocket!
Automatic Upload is very flexible: you can decide how often to upload texts: every 15 minutes, 30 minutes, 1 hour, 2 hours and so on. Also, to maximize performances, you can choose to disable Automatic Upload while you are not connected to a WiFi network.
Unlike many other iPhone applications running in background that consumes battery power much more than normal, iTextUploader’s Automatic Upload is highly optimized for maximum battery life.
The application is only launched when it has to upload messages and, thanks to Smart Upload (the key feature of iTextUploader 2.0), it uses the network as little as possible. We believe we did a good job: while we were testing Automatic Upload in the past weeks, we did not notice a considerable impact on battery life.
For technical reasons, though, Automatic Upload will be available only for VIP users. Those are all users who donated to our project 5€ or more.
We are sorry we had to do this, but we had no choices. If we let everyone use Automatic Upload, our systems would soon become overloaded, making the site unusable for everyone.
VIP users will have all the advantages of current donors, plus the ability to use Automatic Upload. To sum up, here’s a list of privileges reserved to VIP users:
To become a VIP user, you need to make a donation of just 5€ (or more).
For your convenience, we have also prepared an automated system to process donations. This means that, unlike in past, donations will be received almost instantly, and the upgrade of users account to VIP will require just a few seconds, after you complete the checkout using PayPal.
Users who had already donated will become automatically VIP.
We are currently completing a last couple of things, and iTextUplaoder 2.5 will be released in a few days (before the end of the week).
iTextUploader 2.2 has just been released in both Cydia and Installer!
This is the real, working iTextUploader 2!
iTextUploader 2.0 was an unlucky release: despite the long, public beta testing phase, it contained an error that made the application crash for some users.
That error is now fixed, and iTextUploader 2.2 is working correctly.
To see what’s new in iTextUploader 2.x, please read the original announcement.
iTextUploader 2.2 contains also a new application icon: we hope this one looks better in your Springboard. Do you like it?
As someone has probably noticed, a new release of iTextUploader has just appeared in Cydia…
But it’s not a new one!
iTextUploader 2.0.1 is JUST version 1.1.0
iTextUploader version 2.0, released a few days ago, contained a bug that made the application crash on some iPhones.
We have been struggling with this for 2 days, and we haven’t found the cause of the issue yet; so, we decided it was better to put the old, working version up.
But, to make sure the old release is up and visible, we had to change the version to something higher than 2.0.
If iTextUploader 2.0 was working correctly for you, you don’t need to update to 2.0.1!
We apologize again for the inconvenience. We are continousy working on the issue, and a patched release of iTextUploader 2.0 will arrive as soon as possible.
Thank you for your patience.
Finally, after a long development, iTextUploader 2.0 has been released!
You will find it in both Cydia and Installer in a few hours.
The biggest change in iTextUploader 2 is the new Smart Upload.
We have completely rewritten the most important part of iTextUploader – that is, the code that manages the upload of new messages, making it much, much better!
The key points of Smart Upload are:
Almost all these ideas came from feedback we got from our users.
In addition to Smart Upload, we have fixed some minor bugs.
We said the improvements in reducing uploaded data volume (and thus making upload faster) were simply awesome.
But, how much faster is Smart Upload?
To test it, we started with a database containing about 10 000 messages and uploaded it for the first time.
WITHOUT Smart Upload, size of uploaded data is 4712 KB (abut 4,5 MB!). It takes about 10 minutes over EDGE!
WITH Smart Upload, size of uploaded data is just 156 KB! Using EDGE, it takes just 20 seconds to upload!
With Smart Upload, importing new messages is 97% faster!
In real usage, then, it’s even faster!
In fact, while iTextUploader 1.x used to upload all your messages every time (even if there was just 1 new!), iTextUploader 2 sends only last ones! So, if you have thousands of messages in your database, importing new ones can be much, much faster!
How could we achieve this? It has been possible thanks to the use of Gzip compression on data represented in JSON format.
iTextUploader 2 will be available in both Installer and Cydia in the next few hours.
Of course, it is completely free!
Our service is completely free, and we could not survive if it wasn’t for the support we always get from donors.
We can’t stop thanking them, every time. To show our gratitude, we have been removing every limit for them (allowing them to store unlimited messages).
But we knew we could do more.
Starting from today, in addition to the previous privileges, every user that donated 5€ or more won’t see advertisements in iTextUploader anymore!
After less than a couple of weeks, we are now ready to release the second beta for iTextUploader 2!
You can already find it at this page.
Users who installed beta 1 are required to update soon: the first beta will be disabled by our server in a few days.
Beta 2 finally completes the feature set of iTextUploader 2, adding the Import contact names function.
With Smart Upload, added in beta 1, we were already extracting names from the address book when importing new contacts. However, before this update no one could automatically add names to already uploaded contacts.
As for beta 1, using this version is recommended only to expert users.
Also, please report every error or strange behaviour you might find.
The development of iTextUploader 2 will continue with a third beta, which will hopefully be the last before the final, public release.
A bug in beta 2 has been found in the “Import contact names” component, that prevented it to work in some occasions.
We have just released beta 3, a small update fixing this issue.
Beta 3 solves also a login issue with passwords containing the “+” symbol (this bug is present in the stable 1.x branch too).
Finally, after a long development, we have just released the first beta of iTextUploader 2!
First of all, let me say that this version will never appear in Cydia: since it’s not stable, we don’t want everyone to use it!
To download it, please go to this page and follow the instructions there.
We recommend it only to expert users.
Also, if you try it, please report every error or strange behaviour you might find.
iTextUploader 2 brings a completely rewritten import system, called Smart Upload.
Key features of Smart Upload are:
This is the first beta so it might include many bugs. Also, a couple of features are still missing.
If everything goes in the right way, the final version might come in a few of weeks.
We have just completed a new update for the WebApp!
At the same time, we have moved the site (again) to a new server, which should keep our data in a safer way.
Most of the work for this release has been done “under the hood”: we had to prepare the site for the new iTextUploader 2!
For this purpose, we had completely rewritten the Address Book backend.
In response to your feedback, then, some other changes have been made:
iTextUploader 2 beta is being packed right now and will be released very soon (probably in a couple of days).