Hack15.Let Your Mac Answer and Log Your Calls

Hack 15. Let Your Mac Answer and Log Your Calls

Ovolab's amazingly simple Phlink telephony package lets you do some really cool stuff on your Maclike answer calls and remotely control your Mac with a telephone call.

Watching Steve Jobs pitching the digital lifestyle at Macworld Expo is a favorite pastime of Mac enthusiasts. In fact, there's little that Mac users love more than watching the leader of the Mac world tout new developments and cool little tweaks in Apple's flagship iLife applications: iTunes, iPhoto, iDVD, iMovie, and GarageBand. But for all the pomp and circumstance surrounding these ravishing rollouts, Apple seems to have missed a critical component of the digital lifestyle, one that was around long before DVDs or MP3stelephony.

Fortunately, an Italian company called Ovolab has created a really cool application that serves as the missing telephony link for iLife. Phlink is a hardware-software combination that answers calls with a voicemail greeting, logs them, and even allows you to set up AppleScripts that you can control remotely from a touch-tone phone. The hardware piece of the Phlink setup is a USB device with two RJ11-type ports, one for your standard phone line and another for your analog legacy telephone. The software component (available at http://www.ovolab.com/phlink/) consists of an application that looks like iTunes (see Figure 2-10). You get all of this for less than the cost of dinner (at a really nice restaurant).

Installing Phlink is a snap. Just plug the USB interface into an available spot on your Mac or its keyboard. There's no power adapter to worry about, thankfully. Plug your phone line into the "line" port on the USB interface, and plug your analog phone into the "aux" port. Then, drag the Phlink icon from the included CD-ROM to your Mac's Applications folder.

Figure 2-10. Phlink's main interface

2.9.1. Pop-Up Caller ID Notifications

In Phlink's Preferences window (available by clicking Preferences from the Phlink menu), you can enable an option that shows you a pop-up window with the caller IDs of incoming calls on your screen, so you can decide whether you want to answer them without having to even take your eyes off the screen, let alone leave your desk.

What's cooler than that? Well, how about telling your Mac to answer the call so that you can get on with what you're doing and not be bothered with answering the phone. To do so, just click on the round phone button in the Phlink action window, as shown in Figure 2-11. This starts the greeting to the caller and records the caller's message.

Figure 2-11. Phlink's action window

2.9.2. Custom Greetings

When Phlink answers each incoming call, it looks in the Phlink Items folder in the Library/Application support folder of your user profile for a file called greeting.txt. If it finds the file, it uses the Mac's built-in speech synthesis to speak the words in the file to the incoming caller. To modify this greeting, simply refill the contents of this file with whatever you like.

If Phlink can't find the greeting.txt file, it looks in the same directory for greeting.aif or greeting.mp3. Whichever of these files is present is played back to the caller. To create your own audio greeting, use a recording program (such as Cacophony [Hack #22]) to record and mix this greeting as you see fit.

To get files into the right format for a greetingi.e., AIF or MP3use SoX. Refer to "Create Telephony Sounds with SoX" [Hack #24] for tips.

2.9.3. Answer Fax Calls

Phlink can answer fax calls. In the Preferences window on the Fax tab is a checkbox to enable automatic answering of incoming fax calls. You can have the Mac OS X fax viewer handle the faxes, or use the script option to handle them yourself. And speaking of scripting, now that you've covered the basics of Phlink, let's begin customizing!