So it’s finally time to release my IAX softphone for Macintosh. It’s still very much in beta, but I need feedback on how everything works. There’s a lot of stuff that I’m adding that didn’t make it into this release. Have a look here.
I just need to write rudimentary install instructions, finish the simple homepage for downloading and I’m in business. So any day now…
If you are in a hurry, mail me at info@jackenhack.com and ask if you can join the beta team.
A new beta firmware is available here for the Grandstream GXP-2000 ip-phone. This update adds a number of new features, one of the nicest feature is an address book. This phone gets better and better for every update.
Source: Asterisk VoIP News
I haven’t had time to update my blog for a while. The last couple of days has been spent trying to hunt down an annoying bug in my IAX client I’m writing. Sometimes when dialing in, my program would not get a notification from the Asterisk server that a call was in progress. So I have tested all sorts of things to try to find the bug. So today I finally used tcpdump to see exactly what kind of packets I got from the server. And the problem was that I connected from the inside of my firewall, out trough and back again! So it was just an miss-configuration, the program has been working all along. Isn’t the Darwin award coming up soon?
I’ve been hard at work on my IAX client software the last couple of days. I also have re-written a lot of the code. I decided early on that I wanted to have classical VU-meters to display the in and output volume. But I don’t want them to take to much CPU time. So I made a lot of optimizations on that code. So after the rewrite I managed to lower the CPU utilisation by half. And it’s fun to do programming in Cocoa, but the framework is hard to learn by the volume of it. But slowly I’m getting more comfortable.
The IAX client I’m writing is coming along nicely. It’s now in a state that makes the program usable. And today I made changes so I could compile a universal binary. And the program works on my PPC mac, but I use some libraries I needed to change the makefiles for, so I don’t know if they work on a Intel Mac. It would be cool if I could get the first release to support universal binaries, so hopefully I can find someone who has a developer machine, or a pc with a hacked Mac OS X for Intel on it.
With the latest beta firmware in the Grandstream GXP-2000 VoIP phone, the have added support for BLF. This means that you can use the quick dial LEDs for status of extensions. You can monitor all extensions on your phone. If a extension is busy, the led for that extension is lit. You can also dial directly to the extension by pressing the dial button. Very handy. Continue reading
I now have a working IAX soft phone up and running. Answering and dialing works. The sound quality is good. And the amount of cpu usage is around three percent. But as soon as I add all the animating graphics, like sound input/output meters and stuff, that figure will go up substantially. But one of the goals is to try to avoid letting the program becoming a resource hog.
I decided to really try to stay focused on the basic stuff to really iron out the bugs/memory leaks before continuing to the fun stuff like user interface. But thanks to Project Builder, it’s easy to make a usable interface immediately.
I wanted to call the program Breaker-Breaker! but there’s already a rock band called that. And even worse, a film with Chuck Norris. Next alternative, Ten-Four. If you can think of a better name, please comment.
If I manage to keep this tempo up, I’ll have a usable beta in a couple of weeks. Touch wood.