June 2006

I’m back from the eBay DevCon for a week now and the jetlag has finally gone away. There’s so much to say about the conference - but first a couple of docs announcements. When we were in Las Vegas, Skype 2.5 was released, so the dev notes needed urgent attention on my return. You can download the beta version of Skype API 2.5 developer notes now, including SMS messaging and sharing contact groups. Over at Skype4COM, you can download a beta version which includes SMS messaging and support for Internet Explorer. The Skype4COM docs are updated and also include some cool examples.

It was touch and go if we would get the DevNotes published this week.

Continue reading "Back from eBay DevCon" »

Skype is wrapping up at the eBay Developers Conference. This was our first big developer event. We still got some unconference sessions to go on Monday, but the bulk of the work is done.

We haven’t blogged that much about it, since we’ve been really packed at days with meetings, booth work, sessions, networking and anything else that goes on at such events. The developer community interest in Skype has been really great and it’s been a great venue for us to talk with Skype developers as well as folks from eBay, Paypal, Skype and the larger eBay developer community. Thanks to everyone who took their time to work with us to provide their feedback, comments, questions, play in the labs with Skype API.

We’ll follow this up with our own summaries soon. Meanwhile, check out the Devcon website, blog and the Chatter for other views. You can find all the materials and presentations on the event site.

Some fun bits…

• sorry to all those who wanted a Skype developer zone t-shirt after we ran out of those. They were quite popular, but since somehow a large part of them was shipped to Kentucky (?!?!??!?? don’t ask), we’ll receive them after the conference is over :-)
• there was a Lego competition during one of the lunches where you had to build… anything. Skype was also featured in some of the productions. Thanks guys. Our favourite one is below.
• Lenn kicked off his part of the keynote with the Kid Lucky video. It was fun playing it to the nearly 800 folks present. Hopefully this illustrated what Skype is first and foremost all about — people talking to other people, and everything else comes after that.

I know many of you are awaiting on the results on the recent API contest so I wanted to get the results out before I fly off to Las Vegas tomorrow.

Firstly sorry it has taken so long to get these results out. Only I would decide to end a contest at the same time as putting together the DevCon. It has taken me a little longer to install everything and judge the entries as I have had to juggle priorities around.

Antonie from our developer support team has been extremely helpful in helping me judge the contest and has done the hard work for me, so before we get to the winners, I just want to say a big thanks to Antonie.

As you know there were 3 categories each with a first prize of €2,000 and 5 runner up prizes of €500 each.

You may recall that I amended the rules to say that if a category didn’t have enough entries then we would create a special category (though this would not have a €2,000 1st prize).

So the categories are:

App2App Messaging
eBay Integration
Voice Services
Bonus awards

To judge the awards we looked at both community feedback and feedback from our panel of judges. We also looked at the applications potential and awarded points according.

We found that some applications had been entered into categories where they didn’t fit, for example, some application were added to the App2App category although they didn’t use the App2App messaging API.

Applications entered into the wrong categories were where possible moved to the correct category or entered into the bonus category.

Voice Services was probably the most misunderstood category. The Voice Services category was not intended for voice mail applications, rather applications that are voice enabled – see https://developer.skype.com/VoiceServices for information on the Voice Services Program.

OK so that’s the blurb out the way, here are the results.

Continue reading "API Contest Results" »

If you are a Windows developer this is GOOD news! We have just published a new version of the COM wrapper and the Contact List ActiveX controls. You can download them from:

https://developer.skype.com/Download

This new release has a number of improvements: * SMS action is supported for Contact List (on right-click menu)
* All 27 languages that Skype supports are now also supported everywhere. Tooltips, status messages … everything. This follows the Skype language setting, so it’s all automatic for you.
* Speed improvements - caching is faster and done in a better way
* New classes for A2A messaging making it simpler and more robust to work with.
* Improved documentation and example scripts for both the Contact List and the com wrapper.

I am especially glad that we managed to get this important upgrade out before I go to Las Vegas to talk about these components. Hope to see some of you there. :-)

The presentation about the Skype ActiveX components will be posted online also so you can watch it even if you don’t make it to Las Vegas this time. So will all the other presentations also, of course!