Software and Technology Musings
 
iSync Phone Plugins
 
iSync is a Mac OS X application that allows your address book (and calendar) to be synchronized with your mobile phone. However, support for the latest phones usually appears several months after the phone release.  I have written custom phone plugins for the Motorola V195 and Motorola V325 phones, both of which are yet to be supported by Apple. Tao of Mac provides valuable information for those interested in writing custom iSync phone plugins.
 
  1. • Motorola v195 plugin for iSync 2.3 and Mac OS X 10.4.7
  2. • Motorola v325 plugin for iSync 2.3 and Mac OS X 10.4.7
 
Here is an iSync plugin for the Motorola v325i  (derived from the above v325 plugin by Steve Leoppky; questions should be directed to Steve:  stvn [at] leoppky.com )
 
  1. • MotorolaV325iPlugin.zip for iSync2.3 and Mac OS X 10.4.7 and later.
 
Skype and Polycom Communicator
 
Polycom recently released a Skype USB speakerphone called the Communicator.  Drivers are currently only available for Windows and Mac support is under development. However, I found that  the device works well with Mac OS X but with certain limitations. Upon plugging in, the device is recognized by the inbuilt Mac OS audio drivers. You need to go to “System Preferences” and choose “Sound”.  Polycom Communicator appears under both Input and Output devices -- choose it and it works! The following caveats hold:
  1. • The communicator has built-in buttons for volume control  -- these don’t work since they rely on driver support. The mute button works, however, since it turns off the microphone in hardware.
  2. • The Communicator, unlike some other speakerphones on the market, does not perform noise/echo cancellation in hardware and instead relies on a software driver to implement this and other nice functionality. Without custom drivers, you will not benefit from these features on a Mac. However, Skype itself performs echo cancellation, so you can currently use Skype and the Communicator without a custom device driver.
  3. • Sometimes you need to set the audio device in Skype preferences to Polycom, since Skype can default to the internal speakers and microphone at startup.
The above information was verified on a Powerbook G4 running Mac OS 10.4.7 and Skype 1.5 beta.
 
 
(c) 2006 Prashant Shenoy, Last update August 26, 2006.