Gizmo Project Voice Chat Plugin

ElCrazon · Post by **ElCrazon** » Wed Jul 27, 2005 6:51 pm

Hello,

I work for SIPphone, the makers of the Gizmo Project which you may have seen on slashdot recently along with various blogs. Anyway, I've written an Adium plugin for the Gizmo service but I'm having trouble figuring out how to add contact specific context menus. Any devs care to tell me how this is done?

Thanks a lot,
Iain

Post by **Catfish_Man** » Wed Jul 27, 2005 7:13 pm

Hm... I'd recommend stopping by our irc channel (#adium, on irc.freenode.net). There's usually a developer or two there, and it's a lot quicker than back and forth on the forums.

Post by **The_Tick** » Thu Jul 28, 2005 1:39 am

Actually, since you are here, I emailed about adding Growl support to the Gizmo client, did you get that?

ElCrazon · Post by **ElCrazon** » Thu Jul 28, 2005 4:19 am

Yes, I'm fairly sure I responded to it. I can look into it further, but I do not know the Mac client very well. I'm sure out mac guy will get to it if he has time. (He usually does because he implements stuff twice as fast as the windows dev.

)

Post by **The_Tick** » Thu Jul 28, 2005 4:35 am

That's because cocoa rules.

I just got it

port80 · Post by **port80** » Thu Jul 28, 2005 10:33 pm

All right, I'll bite - what sort of Gizmo-related functionality are you planning to implement with this Adium plugin? Is this intended as some sort of a bridge between Adium and Gizmo, or are you implementing VoIP in Adium? (The latter would be both surprising and impressive.)

zaudragon · Post by **zaudragon** » Thu Jul 28, 2005 10:36 pm

And when this is finished… what licence would it be in?

ElCrazon · Post by **ElCrazon** » Thu Jul 28, 2005 10:58 pm

Well, it's pretty much full VoIP support. Having only a bridge would kinda of break the idea of only having to have one client open to do all your stuff. It loads up your contact list and you can call them from within Adium. It's basically a just a plugin for another "service" like AIM or MSN.

Anyway, I figured out the menu issue. It was just a matter of inheriting the right function.

I'm not sure what license it will be in. Theoretically you have to be "licensed" to use the core API becasue of the GIPS codec. This is one of the reasons it's not currently available to any of the public.

port80 · Post by **port80** » Fri Jul 29, 2005 1:10 am

Full VoIP support in Adium, at least as a protocol plugin? Freaking. Awesome.

This, of course, inspires two more questions:

1. As I understand it, you've created a protocol plugin. Have you also worked on the GUI and hardware interfaces required to make voice chat work, or is that work which has yet to be done?

2. If the changes are only on the protocol level, can this plugin be backported to GAIM?

As far as licensing goes, I'm going to make a (possibly bad) assumption that you're using the freeware lower-quality version of the iLBC codec: http://www.ilbcfreeware.org/

Their license (PDF) seems to be fairly loose: Personal use is permitted, commercial users must register the license with GIPS, but can still generally use it for free. Open source projects like Adium seem to fall in a gray area, but are probably OK. (The main goal of commercial registration seems to be to enforce compatibility - anyone who creates a product which claims to use iLBC has to adhere to the protocol spec.)

To be clear, there are a couple bits of the license that may not work well with the GPL: GIPS owns all contributed modifications to and bug reports about the codec, for instance. However, IANAL nor a GPL expert, so I don't know if this is an irreconcilable conflict.

For what it is worth, Asterisk lists iLBC as one of their codecs. Since Asterisk is GPL'd, I suspect that any conflicts between the licenses Adium and iLBC can be worked out.

http://www.asterisk.org/index.php?menu=features

(Yeah, I can't help but look this gift horse in the mouth. So far, however, those teeth are looking fine.)

Diatribe · Post by **Diatribe** » Fri Jul 29, 2005 12:59 pm

Is this "only" going to bring VoIP support to Adium or full voice chat capability with Gizmo users and therefore Adium to Adium users?
VoIP alone sounds pretty cool though.

ElCrazon · Post by **ElCrazon** » Fri Jul 29, 2005 6:31 pm

Well, I pretty much wrote all my own code to deal with the Gizmo API, and it's all in Cocoa. This includes all the interface work to make and recieve calls. I'm not sure how much work would be required to put it into Gaim, but I'd guess a lot. The Core API is written in C++, so theoretically it could be put into Gaim. However, I am fairly sure that we did license the full version of iLBC from GIPS, the same codec Skype uses.

As of right now it is only an interface to Gizmo and not other VoIP providers. I'm not sure how many VoIP providers this would work well with anyway due to the whole buddy list issue. With Gizmo you have a centrally buddy list which merges well with an IM paradigm, but other services, which I must say I haven't used, do not have such a feature AFAIK.

So, to answer the third question. Right now it only allows voice chat with other Gizmo users and therefore any Adium user with the plugin.

Diatribe · Post by **Diatribe** » Fri Aug 12, 2005 7:24 am

Just wanted to see how this is coming along. It definitely sounds promising.

drd21 · Post by **drd21** » Sat Aug 13, 2005 12:30 pm

also just wanted to ask, when the plug-in will be ready?

and i have another question.

gizmo restricts users to login with gizmo (siphone.com) accounts. however we already have another sip provider with landline etc.

is there a chance that the registration will be open for other sip accounts or is this more or less a policy question?

and i wanted to mention the phonegaim software which is available for windows and linux however not for mac os. do you know if there is any work ongoing, because phonegaim would allow to use other providers?

ufopsi · Post by **ufopsi** » Sat Aug 13, 2005 9:07 pm

This sounds (ok, joke not wanted) very cool! 8)
By the way, for those wondering why Yahoo! will never implement voice chat into the Mac version: it's because both Yahoo! and MSN use a codec (TrueSpeech) that simply doesn't exist on Macs. Our only hope is gaim.

revolution · Post by **revolution** » Wed Aug 24, 2005 6:28 pm

Just wondered if there was any news on this?? I;ve become very interested in some how using the internet for free calls. Trouble is I wish to use one program (Adium) to control it all.

Whats the status of this project??