December 2005

This week I have been lazing around and reading a few books as well as going to the movies. I saw King Kong, Harry Potter, and Narnia in the last few days, all of which were pretty good. On the way back from the cinema we saw a truck that had fallen into the mother of all pot holes. In the middle of the street one of the truck font wheels had completely fallen into a hole that must have 3 feet deep. The frustrated driver was trying to drive out but there was no way it was coming out with out a crane.

On Sunday I watched the football, San Paulo v Liverpool in the Super Cup, that was pretty fun, when San Paulo won people were dancing in the street and an amazing amount of fireworks were going off around the city. I can’t wait for England to win the World Cup next year.

We had some sever storms that knocked out the electricity for several hours the other day. No TV and no lights, lucky we had just eaten. As the electric had failed I decided that I would rescue the beers from the fridge and save them from getting warm. I manage to rescue 7 beers, my wife wouldn’t let me rescue any more.

I seem to be a tasty snack for all the local insects. My foot itches like crazy from something that bit me in the night, and I have a 6 inch red patch on my arm from something that bit me in the cinema.

Better go, the mother-in-law is cooking me some food while my father-in-law is pouring me something from a suspicious looking bottle.

Make sure you have a great Christmas holiday whatever you do, and if I get the chance I will try to say Hi again before the New Year.

Lester

Developer Notes for 2.0 Skype release are now available.

The Skype API for Windows 2.0 introduces the following features:

• Make video calls
• Group contacts
• New buttons and screen appearance
• Tools to personalise Skype
• Change avatars
• Mood messages and timezone

This release also includes the following:

• Other enhancements
• Controlling ringing on PC speakers
• Page scrolling
• Managing echo and gain cancellation
• Contact management
• Managing call status
• Bugfixes
• Deprecations

Continue reading "Developer Notes 2.0 (beta)" »

Well today I start my holiday, almost 3 weeks in sunny Brazil drinking exotic cocktails from coconuts while shoals of fish, hopefully not piranha nibble my toes in the warm Brazilian water.

I am sure I will submit the odd post over the next few weeks, but in the meantime have a great holiday.

Lester

A little while back when I was working on samples for the API documentation, I wanted to provide a snippet of code for every Skype API message. The problem was how to abstract it so it was easy to read and understand.

I worked with a few good friends of mine, Rob Macdonald and Tony Whitter who came up with a lightweight managed wrapper that takes away the complexities writing applications.

SkypeUtilities.CommunicationsManager is a simple library written in C# that performs all the Win32 API interaction required to establish communications with Skype, allowing you to concentrate on building Skype functionality into your applications.

Continue reading "SkypeUtilities.CommunicationsManager" »

You will have noticed that the beta of Skype 2.0 was given a face lift with shiny new icons. No doubt you will want to use these icons in your own Skype enabled application to provide your users with a consistent look and feel.

You can get the new icons from our API usage page.

You probably don’t want to copy and paste all all the icons, so you will find a handy link on the page that will download all the icons in a zip file.

Ap2Ap

About a month and a half ago, Kevin Delaney from KhaosLabs (the guys behind ActiveS ) gave me a fantastic Ap2Ap sample called TicTacToe that you can play across Skype.

Continue reading "Ap2Ap Sample" »

The guys over at Skype Journal dropped me a line to say they have got some stats of the number of downloads of the Learning Skype's Plug-in Architecture document.

If your not familiar with the document, its a great way to learn how to write applications using the Skype API.

Downloads per month for English Version:

Dec-05 2,650

Nov-05 13,370

Oct-05 13,418

Sep-05 17,431

Aug-05 13,637

Jul-05 10,949

Jun-05 19,544

May-05 20,151

Apr-05 16,961



Total over 128,000

It's available in English, Russian, Italian, Spanish, Japanese with Chinese and Polish coming out next week.

You'll find the docs either in the Extras Gallery or over on the Skype Journal website.

It's a great resource and well worth taking a look.

Last week was a busy week. We had Skype Night in London, we released the beta of Skype 2.0, I was out in Frankfurt for an eBay developer conference, and I have been trying to get the Gizmoz interview published.

Continue reading "Talking Headz" »

Have you got the beta of Skype 2.0 yet? Want to know what’s new for developers?

If so, take a look at the VideoandButtons interview in the LearningZone for a quick walkthrough of Skype video and the new Skype buttons that show your presence.

Skype 2.0 adds many new features, and if you take a look at the video interview you will also see Skype Buttons which use our presence server (SkypeWeb).

Though not in the beta, you will be able to place specially designed Skype buttons on your webpage that indicate your Skype status. If you are available then people visiting your site will see that you are online, if you set you status to busy then the button on your button change to indicate busy. This is great for blogs and other areas where you want to display your prescence.

Continue reading "Skype 2.0 for Developers" »