Introducing rb-skypemac
Since I discovered rubyosa, I’ve made it one of my side projects to improve the accessibility of my wife’s iMac. She loves to use Skype to video chat with her mother in Maryland and her brother in New York. However, the tiny buttons in Skype cause the UI to be problematic for her.
What to do?
I planned (and still do) to write a simple UI for Skype with larger buttons and fonts. However, in order to do so, I needed an interface that would allow me to do more than merely send commands to Skype. Sadly, rubyosa falls down here.
But then I found rb-appscript or just appscript. Appscript seems to provide a more direct connection to the Applescript Event layer and it provides return values from Applescript unlike the current 0.4.0 version of rubyosa.
All said, I implemented a small subset of the Skype API as a gem. I’ve submitted it to RubyForge for addition as a project. Until then, I give you rb-skypemac-0.1.0.
I have yet to decide if I will take this gem further. If it proves adequate for my needs, I may just move on to my next project: a more feature complete version of rb-itunes than what has been submitted to RubyForge.
[Get it here: rb-skypemac]
Posted by evan on Saturday, April 21, 2007
blog comments powered by Disqus
My name is Evan Light and, yes, I am a nerd. I'm also a professional software developer who, after spending one too many years contracting to the federal government, escaped into the far more enjoyable commercial world. Having spent several years using C and even more using Java (the latter very nearly caused me to give up programming entirely), I consider myself fortunate to have discovered Ruby and to use it as part of my daily work.