Last night I finished up a patch to the gaim-remote plugin so that I can send aim URIs to set myself away, such as:
gaim-remote uri "aim:goaway?message=having a beer at mcgurks"
Added to that a little procmail recipe with some Perl glue and now I can change my gaim away message from my mobile phone. Also wrote a bit of code to display my gaim away message on my weblog.
One day I hope all of this is a lot easier to accomplish. As it is, getting all this to work involved using shell scripts, Perl, PHP, ssh, and patching a C plugin for gaim. I’m hopeful that things like Galago will go a long way towards better integration. As jimmac points out, instant messaging is increasingly becoming the killer communication app. What we need is better integration between applications and better means of getting at the data. Evolution data server, Beagle, Galago, dbus and the like are so critical for that reason. Add to that nice bindings for C# and other languages, and you’ll be able to make killer applications quickly. And make killer applications such as tomboy even more killer.
Tags: GNOME
April 12th, 2005 at 9:00 pm
Can you post the patched gaim-remote that you made? It would be nice to be able to set the text of the away message.
Nice Job
April 13th, 2005 at 9:19 am
Unfortunately the patch no longer applies. The reason I never submitted it to the gaim developers is that I read that they were working on changing the underlying architecture. I’ll try to dig the patch up (it’s on a machine at home somewhere) and email it to you anyway.
June 9th, 2005 at 1:50 am
I’d also appreciate a copy. It would allow
gaim-remote uri “\”aim:goaway?message=`echo current-track | xmms-shell | cut -f2 -d.`\”"
although presumably away messgaes are not the best mechanism for that…