Skype Developer Zone Blog

It has been awhile since I last did a video.

As I have been talking a lot recently to the Reallusion guys about their CrazyTalk product I though it was a good time to dust the cobwebs off my recording software and dip my toe in the murky video making waters again.

Incase you haven’t heard about or used CrazyTalk before, it’s an avatar product that gives you the ability to talk part in SkypeVideo calls without having a webcam.

You can either be represented using one of the standard supplied images or you can download the CrazyTalk Studio product directly from their website and create your own avatar based on your own photos.

Using the studio it’s very simple to create your own avatar, you just give it a few guide points to mark out the eyes and the mouth and in 4 or 5 clicks of the mouse you have created an avatar that blinks, moves it’s eyes and has lip-syncing during a video call

You can also animate your avatar during a video call using the standard Skype emoticons. For example the (party) emoticon:

If you don’t have a webcam or if like me your webcam points to the ceiling most of the time then take a look at CrazyTalk.

You can watch my short introduction video here, or if you want to go straigt to the install you’ll find it in the extras gallery.

Lenn Pryor is no longer with Skype’s developer relations team.

Neither his team nor the developers nor the management was happy to see him go, but “life is what happens when you’re busy making other plans,” as Lenn quoted John Lennon in his blog post about leaving Skype and Europe and returning to the U.S.

Several developers have asked me who is going to be the new Lenn. I’d say that there is no new Lenn, and never will be. But of course there will be someone to take his position in Skype, and I’ve been told that we already have a number of really good candidates, so the team shouldn’t remain headless for long. In the meantime, Lester Madden is in charge of keeping on the course Lenn laid down, and everybody in the team continues to push forward as hard as always.

I’m back from the eBay DevCon for a week now and the jetlag has finally gone away. There’s so much to say about the conference - but first a couple of docs announcements. When we were in Las Vegas, Skype 2.5 was released, so the dev notes needed urgent attention on my return. You can download the beta version of Skype API 2.5 developer notes now, including SMS messaging and sharing contact groups. Over at Skype4COM, you can download a beta version which includes SMS messaging and support for Internet Explorer. The Skype4COM docs are updated and also include some cool examples.

It was touch and go if we would get the DevNotes published this week.

Continue reading "Back from eBay DevCon" »

Skype is wrapping up at the eBay Developers Conference. This was our first big developer event. We still got some unconference sessions to go on Monday, but the bulk of the work is done.

We haven’t blogged that much about it, since we’ve been really packed at days with meetings, booth work, sessions, networking and anything else that goes on at such events. The developer community interest in Skype has been really great and it’s been a great venue for us to talk with Skype developers as well as folks from eBay, Paypal, Skype and the larger eBay developer community. Thanks to everyone who took their time to work with us to provide their feedback, comments, questions, play in the labs with Skype API.

We’ll follow this up with our own summaries soon. Meanwhile, check out the Devcon website, blog and the Chatter for other views. You can find all the materials and presentations on the event site.

Some fun bits…

• sorry to all those who wanted a Skype developer zone t-shirt after we ran out of those. They were quite popular, but since somehow a large part of them was shipped to Kentucky (?!?!??!?? don’t ask), we’ll receive them after the conference is over :-)
• there was a Lego competition during one of the lunches where you had to build… anything. Skype was also featured in some of the productions. Thanks guys. Our favourite one is below.
• Lenn kicked off his part of the keynote with the Kid Lucky video. It was fun playing it to the nearly 800 folks present. Hopefully this illustrated what Skype is first and foremost all about — people talking to other people, and everything else comes after that.

I know many of you are awaiting on the results on the recent API contest so I wanted to get the results out before I fly off to Las Vegas tomorrow.

Firstly sorry it has taken so long to get these results out. Only I would decide to end a contest at the same time as putting together the DevCon. It has taken me a little longer to install everything and judge the entries as I have had to juggle priorities around.

Antonie from our developer support team has been extremely helpful in helping me judge the contest and has done the hard work for me, so before we get to the winners, I just want to say a big thanks to Antonie.

As you know there were 3 categories each with a first prize of €2,000 and 5 runner up prizes of €500 each.

You may recall that I amended the rules to say that if a category didn’t have enough entries then we would create a special category (though this would not have a €2,000 1st prize).

So the categories are:

App2App Messaging
eBay Integration
Voice Services
Bonus awards

To judge the awards we looked at both community feedback and feedback from our panel of judges. We also looked at the applications potential and awarded points according.

We found that some applications had been entered into categories where they didn’t fit, for example, some application were added to the App2App category although they didn’t use the App2App messaging API.

Applications entered into the wrong categories were where possible moved to the correct category or entered into the bonus category.

Voice Services was probably the most misunderstood category. The Voice Services category was not intended for voice mail applications, rather applications that are voice enabled – see https://developer.skype.com/VoiceServices for information on the Voice Services Program.

OK so that’s the blurb out the way, here are the results.

Continue reading "API Contest Results" »

If you are a Windows developer this is GOOD news! We have just published a new version of the COM wrapper and the Contact List ActiveX controls. You can download them from:

https://developer.skype.com/Download

This new release has a number of improvements: * SMS action is supported for Contact List (on right-click menu)
* All 27 languages that Skype supports are now also supported everywhere. Tooltips, status messages … everything. This follows the Skype language setting, so it’s all automatic for you.
* Speed improvements - caching is faster and done in a better way
* New classes for A2A messaging making it simpler and more robust to work with.
* Improved documentation and example scripts for both the Contact List and the com wrapper.

I am especially glad that we managed to get this important upgrade out before I go to Las Vegas to talk about these components. Hope to see some of you there. :-)

The presentation about the Skype ActiveX components will be posted online also so you can watch it even if you don’t make it to Las Vegas this time. So will all the other presentations also, of course!

I know a lot of people out there are eager to meet up with Skype at the eBay Developer Conference in June so I just wanted to drop a quick post to tell you how you can do that.

1) You can drop by the Skype booth during the exhibition (don’t forget to collect your Skype goodie).
2) You can come by the expert lounge to meet us.
3) You can schedule one 2 one meetings with us on the Monday using the conference bulletin board which goes live on the 11th June.
4) You can grab us over a beer at one of the parties.
5) You can come to one of our sessions and grab us after the talk.

We hope to see you there.

Sometimes developers need access to old versions of other software — for example, in order to make sure their stuff is backwards compatible with earlier releases of whatever external apps they work with. So we have built a directory of historic builds of Skype client software; it is available to all logged-in users of Skype Developer Zone in the Download section. Enjoy!

The eBay DevCon is less than a month away and it’s going to be a fantastic event. Not only do we have 2 hands on training labs to get you started with Skype programming and how to build applications that use the Application to Application messaging API, we have 7 sessions including a session on the future of the Skype API.

On the Skype booth we will have goodies and prizes to give away to lucky developers so make sure you keep some space in your travel bags.

If you haven’t registered yet (shame on you) or if you haven’t heard about the conference (where have you been) then you can find all the details and register here.

For those that will be attending the event we will have a special wiki page for you to schedule time with the Skype staff. So you can either come by our Skype booth for a chat or schedule a meeting with one of our Skype PM’s, Developers or Support guys.

And there is still more. On the Monday we have a special unconference day which is your day to suggest the agenda.

For all the details and to access the conference wiki then take a look here.

The conference costs $395 for both days ($445 if you register on the day)

As some of you may have noticed, our issue tracker, jira, has been refusing to accept new issues between 1400 GMT yesterday and 1300 GMT today. We believe that we finally managed to find the reason for this, and fix it. However, if you do find yourself facing a problem with Jira, feel free to leave a comment on DevZone feedback wikipage.

In a perfect world, there are no such things as bugs and configuration errors. But in the real world, IT sometimes just happens. Please accept my apologies.