So, I’m a huge fan of Vonage VoIP service. I’m also a huge home theater PC (HTPC) freak. So I had an idea that much like peanut butter and chocolate, these two technologies must merge! So a while back I created a plugin for Meedio that allows me to dial telephone numbers in my phone book from the comfort of my couch. Ok, so it is completely the laziest thing in the world, but someone had to do it, eh? Anyway, this update to the DialMee plugin was simply to fix a bug that was causing an error beep on exit of Meedio. I described in myprevious post what Meedio is all about, if you missed that.
As far as the technical details of what this plugin does, it relies on phone book entries that were previously imported into a Meedio library. Once you’re viewing your contacts on screen you can press buttons on the side of the screen that allow you to dial the person’s home, office, mobile, etc. The mechanism used for this is some crazy regular expression matching for attempting to take any inputted US telephone number format and convert it to the 10-digit dialing format that Vonage expects. Next, I make a web request to Vonage’s Third Party Call Control to initialize the telephone call. From an end user perspective, it goes like this:
1) Pick up remote control
2) Find contact in phone book.
3) Click button to dial their home/office/mobile, etc. number.
4) Behind the scenes the web request to third party call control happens and your home telephone line (Vonage) rings.
5) Upon answering the cordless phone (you didn’t think I’d get off the couch did you?), the Vonage third party call control then dials the destination telephone number and connects the two parties.
6) You talk…on the couch….in your pink fuzzy slippers. Ok, maybe not pink, but definitely fuzzy.
Agree? Disagree? Let me know with a comment...