[comp.soft-sys.andrew] Fwd: Help with ness/voice

janssen@parc.xerox.com (Bill Janssen) (09/13/90)

The approach suggested in the following is sort of generic, so I thought
I'd post it to the list.  Maybe someone has a better notion...

Bill

---------- Forwarded message begins here ----------

Excerpts from mail: 12-Sep-90 Help with ness/voice Chandra
Venkatraman@iag. (2410)

>     I need some help fast.   I have built some hardware and wrote some
> software to send a voice files (voice mail) to AMS.  I have made sure
> that the subject has a unique (sort of) word 'voice-file'.   As soon as
> I click in messages this file, I would like the contents to be sent to
> my 'playback' application.  'playback' is a C program.

So far as I can see, there two ways to do this without modifying
messages.  What you need is a hook that gets called when you select a
message from the captions window.  You could do it with ness and
keystroke binding (for a demo) in the following way:

Suppose you have two messages in a folder.  The first is simple text,
saying something like "The following message is voice mail.".  The
second is voice mail.  Then write a small ness program that goes to the
next message, and takes the content of the message and passes it to
playback.  Bind a keystroke to the ness program.  Click on the first
message, then advance to the voice mail message using the keystroke. 
The tricky part is actually getting hold of the message body.  I'm not
sure you can get enough info from messages with ness.

The second way is to write a small inset for voice mail that does
playback of the voice mail as part of its Update() method.  Use flames
to wrap your voice mail in one of these insets by re-writing the
message.  This way you can just click on the caption of the message, and
when the voice message is exposed, it will be played.  You can just draw
a simple rectangle, with the name of the sender or something, as the
visual appearance.  This is the approach I'd take.  You can modify the
link and linkv classes, shouldn't take more than a day, and you don't
have to worry about either ness or messages.  It will also allow you to
put voice mail things in documents such as reports.
>  
Let me know how it works out.

Bill