Piggybacking
Piggybacking
- Subject: Piggybacking
- From: Hamish Allan <email@hidden>
- Date: Sun, 2 Feb 2003 21:58:31 +0000
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Hi,
Some friends of mine are most amused when I 'ssh' into their Macs and
make their computer talk to them (using synthesised speech). For this I
wrote a command-line utility called 'speak', but they have asked me to
write something with a GUI.
Not wishing to reinvent the wheel, I would much prefer to add a speech
synthesis capability to iChat. There does not appear to be a plugin
architecture for iChat, so I started to think about ways in which I
could intercept the text of instant messages. One way might be to
implement a proxy at the network layer, but this would involve
knowledge of each protocol iChat implements (currently AIM and iChat,
but perhaps Jabber and others in future).
So I wondered whether it might be possible to intercept the text using
using OS X's notification system. In iChat's bundle there is a file
ChatDoc.nib containing a window with a single CustomView used to
display the little bubbles of text. There is a ChatController with
interesting-looking messages such as 'sendMessage:' and
'sendPartialMessage:'. And there is a subclass of NSTextView called
ChatView which I suspect takes a chat transcript in some format
providing metadata (probably XML) and displays it as balloons or plain
text according to the user's preferences.
I'm new to Mac OS X programming, so I don't really understand how
notifications work, but I just thought I'd ask: does what I'm proposing
sound feasible, in principle? Can I persuade Cocoa to give me another
task's notifications? Perhaps by instantiating an
NSDistributedNotificationCenter within the nib? Or is there some other
way of doing it?
Or perhaps there's a better way to achieve what I'm trying to do?
Or perhaps there's a little checkbox in iChat marked, 'Speak text',
that I've missed?!
Thanks in advance,
Hamish
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