July 8th, 2007
Third-party Skype developers offer feature suggestions
A post by Skype Journal’s Phil Wolff leads us to a Skype Developer Zone wiki page where third-party Skype developers offer their recommendations and added features for future versions of Skype. Proposals and reactions are due in by July 13, which is this Friday.
Some may stay as recommendations, while others will probably become reality.
With that in mind, let’s go down the list. Where I have something to add, I will, in boldface.
OnContactsProfileChange event. Fired when a contact changes any part of their profile
API call to grab avatar in memory rather than via temp file. Yes. The fewer temp files, the better.
Search using exact match instead of wildcards. Yes, yes and yes. Skype search totally needs improvement.
Retrieve properties for one User handle. This could be by a specific call; Get all profile data for this username. Or it could be a hidden side effect of things like a chat usercollection where the API got the profile data from the cloud for you. The problem is that at the moment if the user is unknown to this instance of Skype (contacts or recent search), get user property returns nulls.
Ability to intercept chat messages between being received and being displayed in the UI and modifying or discarding them. This may already be possible.
OnAuthorizationRequest event. Fired when an incoming authorisation request comes in.
Clear Event list. Yes, again. Doing so now is a PITA workaround.
Offer the inner part of a chat window as a UI component to be integrated into other applications. I’d like to see what the code jocks have in mind. Please, though, no clunkiness.
Offer the contact list as a UI component to be integrated into other applications. Perhaps the biggest need of all.
Create and destroy a tab; populate that tab with a browser. (PhilWolff of Skype Journal)
These two are as a workaround for a headless Skype. Would make it easier to reject all contacts requests in an unattended server.
Web Services
Get Public Profile properties for Handle. REST. Pass in a Handle, get back XML or JSON results.
Search and get search results. Similarly. REST. Pass in a search term, get back XML or JSON collection of results.
Redirect service that turns skype: URL links into http: links. As a workaround for systems that validate URLs and reject skype:
Integrate Public chat URLs with TinyURL automatically. So they’re shorter and more usable.
Enhanced Presence (SkypeWeb). Include current location and current Activity/Mood (with appropriate privacy control)
OpenID server. Use Skype’s authentication services to provide a general Authentication service
Public SIP Gateways to the Skype network, automated signup and operation.
Headless Skype. Server version with no UI. If not this then anything to make it easier to run, maintain and keep running a copy that runs on a remote server, unattended.
Other
Ship Skype4Com with the standard Skype install and update it with standard updates
Create a Skype4Com XPI so that the api is exposed to Javascript within Firefox as well as IE
Video conferencing. Amen.
Loading ...Russell Shaw is an enterprise computing journalist, analyst and author based in Portland, Oregon. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
