Quicksilver and Skype with the Service Menu Module in Mac OS X 10.6

[charx]

Hi all,
I use Quicksilver for skype calling, it makes my life quiet easy.
I just installed 10.6 and finally got the install right, and I was
adding the modules. I remember the module that enable the Skype
"call" ability after selecting the phone number in the first Qs
option. Now when I check the "Service Menu Module" in the Quicksilver
it will crash and stop working. I don't know if anyone have tried
this before and encounter the same problem. If you did and found a
way to solve the problem please let me know.

Regards,
Charx

[elspub]

This is, believe or not, NOT quicksilver's bug. Not really.

Snow Leopard changed the nature of Services pretty seriously. The
Service's plugin for Quicksilver was written for Tiger. It's not a
bug, it's in need of at least a partial update.

However, I was going to take a look and see if Skype is
applescriptable for you. And realized its very applescriptable, and
wrote a Quicksilver action to send phone numbers to Skype to make a
call.

You can download it here: http://tr.im/D4J6

Install it to: ~/Library/Application Support/Quicksilver/Actions
Then restart QS.

To use, grab a phone number from your address book (requires the
address book plugin), or type in a phone number in QS text entry mode.
Tab over and type till you see callSkype, hit enter.

This should work. I've got it set to first strip out parenthesis,
dashes, and spaces from the number so you don't need to worry about
that formatting. Then it checks if the first character of the phone
number is a "+" (skype needs phone numbers to be in the format
"+CCC1234567890", where CCC is the country code. If you want to call
outside the US you'll need to make sure you numbers are in that
format. Inside the US they can be formatted for skype, but if they're
not (if there's no "+" at the beginning) the script tacks on a "+1"
for you. If you store your numbers as "1(222)333-4444", that's ok
too. In the case of numbers not starting with "+", the script takes
the last 10 digits of whatever you send it and adds the "+1".

I'll post this in the main board as an action as well. But you can
download it at the link above.

[charx]

Thanks for the tip. I just have one question, the actions is a plist
file while the download you give me is a script file. How do I
"install" it to the plist file?
Thanks

[elspub]

Oh. If you don't already one, create a folder in ~/Library/Application
Support/Quicksilver named "Actions". (so there should be the
Actions.plist and the folder.).

there's a bunch of actions on this site you can install there.

[charx]

Just an update, it works! But immediately after it works, the Qs
shuts down unexpectedly

[elspub]

A few things:
First is what version of QS are you using? I'm using b56a7, and can't
test how it works on other versions.

Second is I changed something that might have been the bug.

The third is if you don't have Growl that might cause the crash.
So download these http://tr.im/D4J6
one is clearly labeled for use without growl. If you have Growl I'd
use that one.
Otherwise they both have the other fix. QS doesn't crash for me using
these.

[Ramesh]

great work, it's very helpful.

[Ramesh]

It'll be great if you can write a script for Telephone (VOIP calling
application)

http://code.google.com/p/telephone/

thanks

[elspub]

I'll take a look at Telephone and see if its applescriptable (not all
apps are)...

In the meantime, if you use telephone to use Google Voice, I've
already written QS actions for Google Voice dialing and SMSing:
The post is here: http://tr.im/Ehou

make sure you get the most recent download (I uploaded a few versions
of it as it developed.) which is also here:
http://tr.im/BUn0

[elspub]

Yea. Unfortunately, Telephone is not Applescript-able.

What VOIP service do you use it for?