Obvious Ideas

I really like avatars and therefore I’m a big fan of Gravatar. When Google first released their Contacts API, the first thing I though of was creating a small application to sync my friend’s Gravatars to my Google Contacts addressbook. The problem was that the first version of the API didn’t have an option to manage the photos of the contacts. Few months later, Google updated the API to include the option to update the contact’s photos. I played a bit with the new API, but never had the time to write the appliaction.

Yesterday  (October 11 2008), the guys from Automattic/Gravatar wrote a post the summarizes their last year. This reminded me of this small project that I always wanted to code. I’ve decidced to code a first release of the application and put the code on Google Code for other to contribute.

I’v decided to make it a .NET application and not a Python script, to address more people (I guess that more people are comfortable with running application than Python scripts). The reason that this isn’t a webapp, is because it takes a whole lot of time to process each contact list. If there was an option to question the Gravatar API for existence of a Gravatar for each email, it would make everything a bit quicker.

It’s .NET 2.0, so I guess there shouldn’t be a problem to run it on Linux using Mono, although I didn’t try that. The code is very simple, so if someone wants to translate it to other languages it’s possible and shouldn’t take too much time.

This is an alpha version, therefore don’t be scared if a nasty exception jumps at you There are a lot of things to imporve, like adding threads to speed up things, time left counter and more. When I will have some more free time, I might add all this.

This is my first opensource project and your comments are mostly appreciated. 

Arik

In case you didn’t know, Skype offers an extensive API for their application. This API can be used via Java library, COM module or a Python library. The Java library, COM Module and Python library all share similar features and I decided to try out the Python library. What I wanted to do is to write a simple Python script that uses the Skype API to send SMS message from Skype. After going through their API documention, I was ready to go and the outcome was this short script: 

I think that the code is pretty straightforward and doesn’t require additional explaining. Feel free to ask questions at the comments.
Arik