April 2006

A forum user known as spud5 just came up with rather an interesting idea:

Make the Skype “engine” available to developers, without the Skype GUI. This would allow developers to build a variety of applications/interfaces to use the Skype communications network. The end users, especially businesses, would have a choice of GUI supplier, and Skype would take more PSTN call revenue.

Continue reading "Naked Skype?" »

Thanks for all the API Developer competition entries we are going to be judging the entries over the next few weeks and will announce the winners shortly.

The contest is now closed for new entries, but if you have entered the contest and don’t see your entry for some reason then let us know.

Good luck to everyone that entered.

I was surprised this morning, out of 250+ entries into the guess the score contest only 2 people guess the score correctly.

So well done to:

Saulius Vilda – Lithuania
Bastian Ruhle – Germany

who both win a Skype certified CyberPhone

Continue reading "Skype Certified Handset Winners" »

Last night, I’ve earned a “honorary” title of IT Manager. I gave the “delete” permission to three other editors in their branches of the Developer Zone main site, and accidentally took away everybody else’s “view” permissions in the same branches. Assuming it was just a simple change, I didn’t take the trouble to recheck the site as an unprivileged user, and happily went to my hotel — where the internet connection happened to be down. So when I returned online this morning, I had all reasons to be pissed off at myself.

There is truth in a favourite saying of one of my good friends — “NEVER assume!”

Continue reading "Never assume!" »

I feel the need to give things away..

The last competition I ran was to guess the score between Arsenal and Real Madrid which proved extremely popular. So as luck has it, I’m in a giving mood and Arsenal are playing Juventus tomorrow so let’s combine the two.

Continue reading "Win A Skype Certified Handset" »

Burrrr it’s a cold day today.

Today I am doing nothing but trying to nail down some issues for the eBay DevCon.

At the conference we will have a class room for 25 people and will be running 2 different hands on training labs:

Getting started building Skype applications
Using the App2App messaging API

We are writing the labs, that’s the easy bit. The challenges come with what software to install on the machines, what development environment to use and getting hold of headphones.

Since we will share a training room with the PayPal guys, we need to ensure our lab doesn’t break theirs. Having done this many times in the past you’d be surprised at what can go wrong when you have several people running different labs from the same machine.

As well as the hand on training we also have a whole technical track dedicated to Skype development.

The sessions are:

Opportunities for Developers using Skypes API
Skype Certified! The 5Ws
The Skype ActiveX Components: Skype Development on Steroids
The Skype Application to Application Messaging API (App2App)
Building Voice Applications Using Voice XML
Servers and Plugins – The future of the Skype API
Using Skype to improve Buyer/Seller communication

I’m very excited about these sessions as not only will they cover in-depth technical information you can’t get anywhere else and won’t have heard before. The speakers will be the Program Manager or Developer responsible for these technologies. In other words, these guys are the bees knees.

You can get full description of all the tracks by visiting: eBay Developer Conference.

Linux/Mac
Incidentally thanks for responding yesterday to my question about Linux & Mac development, I have passed your response on and I will chase it up.

Welcome back from the weekend break.

I was looking over the extras gallery on Friday and one thing struck me. We have just under 400 items in there and I didn’t spot any thing (other than code libraries) for Linux, and nothing for Mac users.

So I wondered where all our Linux/Mac developers are. Is anyone writing apps for the Linux and Mac platforms?

Let me know the reason, I am really curious why there is nothing Linux/Mac related here. Considering the hate mail I receive when I produce a video in WMV and not in a cross platform format I wonder what you guys are developing and what we can do to help you start producing extras for Linux/Mac users.