July 2006

As its Friday your probably looking out the window dreaming of your BBQ tomorrow.

To help take your mind of the mundane issues of work, why not watch a bit of TV. If you do it over Skype then your boss will even think you are working.

I just received word about this web website that streams TV via a Skype video call.

The streaming only lasts for 3 minutes before automatically cutting out, and the TV channels are from Tokyo and Taipei but that’s 3 minutes away from that debugger you have been looking at all morning.

As the website is in Japanese its hard to fathom to much out, but each Skype account has several channels attached which you can change between by sending a chat message.

For example to change to channel 12 you send the message ##12# To get the channel list you are going to have to visit the webpage, but the instructions are in English.

To give it a go, call the following Skype accounts.

dokotv1
dokotv2
dokotv3
activetest
activetest2
activetest_3

I am sure you have been on a Skype call and wanted to share a file with another user or run though a presentation. Sure you can transfer the file to them but sometimes it’s nice just to go over the content online together to get their input or assistance.

Unyte from WebDialogs has been around for a while now, but it’s buried in the extras gallery and I wanted to make sure that everyone has tried it.

Unyte enables you to share you desktop with up to 4 other users online via a web browser. Once you have installed the Skype enabled plug-in your ready begin sharing your desktop with your audience. Unyte makes this simple by adding a ‘share’ icon into your chat windows, so within 1 click of the mouse you can share any application or even give them control of a document so they can edit the document themselves.

Great if you need a hand fixing that complex Excel formula you just deleted from your bosses spreadsheet.

While you need to have the Unyte application installed to being sharing, your audience can be on any platform, the don’t need anything other than a browser, they don’t even need to be running Skype. Though the first thing you should show them is a Skype demo to get them hooked and so the phone call is free next time.

Unyte really is a great application, once you start using it you will wonder how you ever managed without it.

I put together a short video on how it works which you can watch here.

Then you can jump over to the entry in the extras gallery and install it for yourself.

I recently got a suggestion regarding doing more to support conference calls in the Outlook toolbar. Of course I pointed out that we already do quite a lot in that area. Thought I would share it with you here:

1. Select any meeting - you will see a conference button on it

2. From an email - starting an ad-hoc conference call with all the cc:s etc of an email

3. By selecting more than one Outlook contact in your contacts folder

Continue reading "Conference calls from the Outlook Toolbar" »

Did you know that there are several ways to stay up to date with what’s going on at Skype Developer Zone?

All parts of the Zone — blog, wiki, and Jira — support RSS, so you can use your favourite news aggregator to keep track of changes. The wiki also has a special RecentChanges page that you can check every now and then.

Continue reading "DevZone Tip: What's new?" »

It has been awhile since I last did a video.

As I have been talking a lot recently to the Reallusion guys about their CrazyTalk product I though it was a good time to dust the cobwebs off my recording software and dip my toe in the murky video making waters again.

Incase you haven’t heard about or used CrazyTalk before, it’s an avatar product that gives you the ability to talk part in SkypeVideo calls without having a webcam.

You can either be represented using one of the standard supplied images or you can download the CrazyTalk Studio product directly from their website and create your own avatar based on your own photos.

Using the studio it’s very simple to create your own avatar, you just give it a few guide points to mark out the eyes and the mouth and in 4 or 5 clicks of the mouse you have created an avatar that blinks, moves it’s eyes and has lip-syncing during a video call

You can also animate your avatar during a video call using the standard Skype emoticons. For example the (party) emoticon:

If you don’t have a webcam or if like me your webcam points to the ceiling most of the time then take a look at CrazyTalk.

You can watch my short introduction video here, or if you want to go straigt to the install you’ll find it in the extras gallery.

Lenn Pryor is no longer with Skype’s developer relations team.

Neither his team nor the developers nor the management was happy to see him go, but “life is what happens when you’re busy making other plans,” as Lenn quoted John Lennon in his blog post about leaving Skype and Europe and returning to the U.S.

Several developers have asked me who is going to be the new Lenn. I’d say that there is no new Lenn, and never will be. But of course there will be someone to take his position in Skype, and I’ve been told that we already have a number of really good candidates, so the team shouldn’t remain headless for long. In the meantime, Lester Madden is in charge of keeping on the course Lenn laid down, and everybody in the team continues to push forward as hard as always.