Thread: [Announce] qgvdial: Google Voice client for Qt platforms
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uvatbc is offline uvatbc
2010-12-05 , 18:27
Posts: 1,048 | Thanked: 979 times | Joined on Mar 2008 @ SF Bay Area
#159
New build: Connection manager fixed!
-> No more spurious calls from the CM.
-> "Call with qgvdial" and "Text with qgvdial" button on contacts.
-> Calls and texts work!

Please note: Upgrading *may* require a reboot. I don't know why this happens every once in a while.

Originally Posted by xur17 View Post
This page shows what requests are being made by chrome, and is very helpful on deciphering the protocol that the google voice extension uses.

Two useful things I noticed:

Requests are made to: https://www.google.com/voice/b/0/request/messages/ to get a list of the text messages in an account. Each message has a unique ID, and each conversation has a separate unique id.

https://www.google.com/voice/b/0/request/unread/?b=0 returns the number of unread messages in all of the different folders.

I'm not sure how it logs in, etc, but hopefully this makes it easier to check for new text messages, since the current method is to scrape the mobile website, which presents some difficulties. This was the result of a few minutes of playing with the extension, so I am sure there is plenty more to learn about it.
1. Thanks for the chrome link - for everyone else, that is not a clickable link. Copy URL and post into address bar of your chrome window.
2. Unfortunately the extension seems to be pulling unread messages every few seconds - thats what I infer from the events page. This means polling (boooo) and I'm not yet willing to give up on a REST type api.
3. The "current" method of scraping the website is no longer current. I pull messages from https://www.google.com/voice//inbox/recent/ and it comes as XML-JSON. Easy to parse and not dependent on the whims and fancies of the web page format.


Originally Posted by epage View Post
Lately I've been leaning towards contact providers rather than sync, a lot less complicated logic and guessing. libfolks is possibly the direction things will move in but its still a very early project. I've got plans for a couple contact sources I'd love to write.
A contact provider is the obvious direction, but there are some users who want to store their contacts on the phone or already have contacts on the phone.
Some of these users prefer to sync to Google (like me) others like Google but don't want to store all their information with them.
I'm aiming for a CM that works with all these cases.

Originally Posted by epage View Post
Seems like it has the potential for an odd user experience but oh well. Though I'm always disappointed in competition rather than help I wish you good luck and hope it turns out well. By this I mean that I'm already spread thin and would appreciate assistance plus it brings up tough questions like "what is the future role of my app? should I just encourage my users to transition or should I keep maintaining".
Your disappointment is understandable, but that was not my intention.
How much time and effort will it take me to learn Python well enough to hack at TOR and DC, versus do what I know well - C++ and QT - and make use of the information that people like xur17 keep finding?
What is the possibility of me ever getting to use Python professionally when even C++ and QT is a far cry from what I'm really doing?
I'm doing this for fun and I don't want it to be too much hard work (although it has become that), so it comes down to what method has the least effort to enjoyment ratio.
I have ulterior motives as well: I like QT a lot and I wanted to promote it to my team as "the one way" to do almost any userland app on multiple platforms. When the inevitable "show me examples of what it can do" came up, it was so easy to show my own app.
qgvdial uses networking, dbus, gui, sql, webkit, xml, scripting, json and qml. It is the perfect QT showcase!

Originally Posted by epage View Post
The external daemon approach could have some benefits though (like already being logged in).
Yes. Also: separated testing and upgrades.
__________________
qgvdial: Google Voice client. All downloads
qgvtp: Phone integration for the n900 that dials out and sends texts using qgvdial.
mosquitto: message broker that implements the MQ Telemetry Transport protocol version 3.
qgvnotify: Google voice and contacts notifier for diablo and maemo.

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