Comments on: Adobe AIR App Breathes Cross-Platform Life into Google Voice

By: elldove

elldove — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 16:47:26 +0000

Kevin you should try these applescript tricks for dialing and smsing with GV. There’s snow leopard services, you just right click on a phone number and can either dial or sms.

There’s also Quicksilver actions of the same. http://tr.im/DeTU

By: Robert

Robert — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 21:03:47 +0000

Hey everyone,

Thanks for the great feedback here and the e-mails we’ve received already today. We do have bigger plans for this little app. As I mentioned to Kevin, this was really just something we were doing as a favor for our consulting clients and didn’t intend broader distribution. But I liked using it so much that we decided to give it out to more people.

I personally like having this as a separate app running on a secondary desktop display, but then again I also tend to use the mouse and never missed the keyboard shortcuts, so what do I know.

Now that we have the ball rolling on this we will have keyboard shortcuts in a day or two, and Growl/toast notifications shortly after that. Beyond that we have a lot of other ideas so we’ll just keep going. The app will automatically check for new versions so you should get new features as we post them.

Keep the feedback coming and we’ll keep working on this.

By: James Kendrick

James Kendrick — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 20:56:16 +0000

I’ve been using GV as a web app created with the Prism add-on in Firefox. Very good way to work with “appy” web sites. :)

By: trellis

trellis — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 19:23:15 +0000

Great suggestion, Curtis. I just created a standalone Google Voice webapp using Google Chrome and it works great. I haven’t used it long enough to know how often it refreshes, but all the expected GV UI behavior is there!

By: Kevin C. Tofel

Kevin C. Tofel — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 18:36:19 +0000

Certainly a good suggestion and one I’ve leveraged in the past with Chrome. It may just be personal preference, but I like how this early version refreshes each minute and takes up little in terms of resources. If the developer can get Growl notifications implemented, I’d definitely lean towards this standalone AIR app, but again: different strokes for different folks. ;)

By: Curtis Carmack

Curtis Carmack — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 18:12:39 +0000

Kevin, you might try using a web app (either with FF or Chrome) created from a browser tab. It nets you the full website functionality (which this app doesn’t offer) and also allows you to customize the size and placement of the app window. I find this to be very functional.

By: Ben L.

Ben L. — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 16:19:43 +0000

I’ve been using this – http://thatsmith.com/2009/03/google-voice-add-on-for-firefox for a while and while it’s not perfect the one thing I do like about it is that you can just double click on a ph# in a FF web page much like you can do with an email addy and this will bring up a small popup confirmation asking if you wanted to dial this # with you GV (click OK and you are engaging GV to call you then the #), and that’s handy *for me*.

By: trellis

trellis — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 15:45:08 +0000

I installed this on my Linux netbook. It’s pretty cool. If I had my druthers, I’d like the Quick Call and SMS text fields to automatically-search recipients by name; right now you have to explicitly type in recipients phone numbers into those fields. I’d also like to see standard GV keyboard shortcuts: C for call and M for SMS.

Thanks for the heads up!

By: Pam T.

Pam T. — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 14:17:04 +0000

I’m going to look into this app, Kevin. Thanks!

I’ve been having problems getting voice mail on my jailbroken iPhone. Rather than rebuild it, I hunted up AT&T’s instructions on how to forward my unanswered calls to my GVoice number. Now I get my voice mail and I absolutely love that I get text and email notifications of the voicemail.

Technology is so cool!