[Psst! I'm going to talk about Twitter later. Makes it all worth reading, huh?
Will you ever resurrect the concept of Computer Telephony Integration (CTI) for your desktop computers? I can understand if you don’t want to go down that path again given what happened with the aborted GeoPort Telecom Adaptor. That didn’t work out too good for you, did it?
Many people these days don’t even have a land line connected telephone, instead relying on their mobile phones. I’m not going to get into the pros and cons of each, but I’m just musing about what could have been.
Currently, you’re so hostile towards CTI that you don’t even allow the Address Book application to dial using your USB modem.
And nobody is ever going to accuse you of embracing faxing. While there is support in OS X for both sending and receiving faxes, it’s so poor as to be less of a hobby than the stepchild Apple TV. Although, the sooner faxes become a forgotten technology, the better. I despise faxing.
But there’s a lot more to CTI than dialing out and faxing.
One of the best products for the Mac when it comes to using your home telephone is Parliant’s PhoneValet. I use this product and love it. It lets me build my own voice mail system with profiles for specific callers such as family, friends, work, telephone solictiors, etc. Very easy to use and very powerful.
But, as much as I love it I cannot recommend it because it hasn’t seen any updates in the 16 months since I bought it. I have contacted the developers but they didn’t give me much hope. Of course, companies don’t want to talk about what they’re working on. The next version will be announced when it’s ready. Cricket, cricket, …
There’s so much potential for this product that I fear I will never see. And that brings me back to your lack of interest in telephony.
Let me see if I can get your creative juices flowing.
For over a year now I’ve had my PhoneValet system send me a text message to my cell phone whenever my home phone rang. I did this using PhoneValet’s weak, but adequate, AppleScript support to send a web update to Twitter to a protected account. From another account, I followed the first account and an SMS message is sent by Twitter to my mobile phone with the call display information of the home caller whenever the first Twitter account has an update. I know the date, time, caller name and number. Pretty cool.
How fast is this, you ask? I get the text message on my mobile phone between the first and second ring of my home phone. Clever people who know telephony know that the call display information is not even delivered to your home phone until after the first ring. So, yes, this is damn fast!
I think it’s ironic that you have this fancy iPhone that can only sync with a home computer when it’s connected by a USB cable, or through MobileMe. It must disappoint you that not everyone in the world has an iPhone, yet you walk away from millions of your customers who have Macs and land lines by not offering any interesting features.
Skype and iChat have their places, but it’s not the same as integrating with my home telephone. Maybe I’m old fashioned, but land lines will be around for a very long time. Why not grab some of that business?
