Request: new buddy icon with webcam

[evan_after]

Hi everyone,

I've been using AdiumX for a couple of months now and love it. Let me state up front that I am _not_ requesting webcam/audio chat support. I used it once in iChat and if I really need it and I can go back over there.

However, what I would like to see is support for changing the buddy icon regularly from a connected camera. I used "iChat Streaming Icon" with iChat and it worked OK, but it'd be nice to have it integrated. I looked at doing it with AppleScript, but the icon doesn't appear to be in a separate file. If it was, I could use Oculus or something to just drop a new picture on a schedule.

Why would you want this? I telecommute quite a bit and it's nice for people to at a glance know if I'm actually at my desk (yes, that can be done with away messages, but pictures are faster to parse).


One other suggestion for the mods. It would be nice to have stickys at the tops of the forums pointing to the product pages for the various items. I didn't know what Growl was when I found the forum at the top level and had to wander over to VersionTracker to find out.

Thanks everyone!

[bgannin]

Icon changes don't propagate to servers as quickly as away messages though, which is why they are used for status.

[evands]

Hi everyone,

I've been using AdiumX for a couple of months now and love it. Let me state up front that I am _not_ requesting webcam/audio chat support. I used it once in iChat and if I really need it and I can go back over there.

However, what I would like to see is support for changing the buddy icon regularly from a connected camera. I used "iChat Streaming Icon" with iChat and it worked OK, but it'd be nice to have it integrated. I looked at doing it with AppleScript, but the icon doesn't appear to be in a separate file. If it was, I could use Oculus or something to just drop a new picture on a schedule.

Why would you want this? I telecommute quite a bit and it's nice for people to at a glance know if I'm actually at my desk (yes, that can be done with away messages, but pictures are faster to parse).

An Applescript could definitely do this. Use Oculus (not familiar with the program, but presumably it takes periodic snapshots from your camera) to get the image. The next step would be to create an applescript which remains running and periodically does something like:

Code: Select all

tell application "Adium"
repeat with theAccount in (every account)
set the image of theAcount to (theImage as data)
end repeat
end tell

I'm not particularly good at applescript, so there are probably errors in that... and that may not be the right way to set the image data, but you can find sample code which does it in the Artwork adiumxtra by hypercube.

Hope that helps, and please share your script once you get it working

One other suggestion for the mods. It would be nice to have stickys at the tops of the forums pointing to the product pages for the various items. I didn't know what Growl was when I found the forum at the top level and had to wander over to VersionTracker to find out.

A good idea. And btw, Growl will be built in to Adium as of 0.8, with an explanation when it is first used as to what it does.

[evan_after]

I didn't realize that was an option for the imagedata. I'll give it a shot in the next few days and let you know how it turns out.

Thanks!