Sunday, June 07, 2009

My VOIP just got better ..

I recently switched by ISP (TPG to Beagle Internet) mainly for ADSL 2+ service. Beagle did not provide VOIP and therefore and also for service decoupling reasons I subscribed to MyNetFone service. I am pretty happy with the service for the call costs primarily to India & USA.

I often do conference calls from home and been looking for ways to use the laptop's mic and speakers as the handsfree. Finally I found the solution. The solution is to ..
  1. Use a Soft phone, configured for the VOIP provider, on my laptop. I found X-Ten X-Lite working just fine on my MacBook Pro and would imagine same on Dell XPS Studio / Vista / Win7 as well. See instructions here.
  2. I found this post with a working Apple Script to integrate Mac's Address Book to X Lite. This way I can right-click and dial a number from the Address Book. Cool ha .. Same script copied below here for convenience and as backup in the this post vanish in future.

    using terms from application "Address Book"
    on action property
    return "phone"
    end action property

    on should enable action for thePerson with theEntry
    if theEntry is not missing value then
    return true
    else
    return false
    end if
    end should enable action

    on action title for thePerson with theEntry
    return "Mit X-Lite wahlen"
    end action title

    on perform action for thePerson with theEntry
    set thePhoneNumber to value of theEntry
    set theolddelimiter to AppleScript's text item delimiters

    set AppleScript's text item delimiters to "(0)"
    set thePhoneNumber to every text item of thePhoneNumber
    set AppleScript's text item delimiters to theolddelimiter
    set thePhoneNumber to thePhoneNumber as text

    set theNewPhoneNumber to ""

    repeat with a from 1 to length of thePhoneNumber
    set theCharacter to character a of thePhoneNumber
    if a is 1 and character a of thePhoneNumber is "+" then
    set theNewPhoneNumber to theNewPhoneNumber & "0011"
    end if
    if "0123456789" contains theCharacter then
    set theNewPhoneNumber to theNewPhoneNumber & theCharacter
    end if
    end repeat

    tell application "X-Lite"
    activate
    tell application "System Events"
    tell process "X-Lite"
    -- delete eventually existing number
    keystroke ""
    keystroke return
    -- dail
    keystroke theNewPhoneNumber
    keystroke return
    end tell
    end tell
    end tell
    return true
    end perform action
    end using terms from



  3. Moreover I could use Soundflower / Audacity like tools to record the call in case if required or when times I am meant to take notes. This I see as a big bonus. Yet to try this on Windows platform.

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I am well fed with these !!