Roddypod

For about a year, I’ve wanted to make an application that could connect to my Vonage account, play my voicemail, save them to my computer, and delete them from the account when done. I first wanted to make it a Dashboard Widget but would need to incorporate Keychain access for storing the account username and password securely. That would be easy but accessing the local disk for storing the files when downloaded would be very difficult, if not impossible. Scratch that. Then, I thought I’d build it as a Cocoa application. That would work nicely but there’s one tiny problem. There is no way for me to access Vonage’s internal services for authenticating and retrieving account information. In a nutshell, there is no Vonage API to do this.

I sent Vonage Customer Service an email asking them about an API that they may be using internally. I think I got a response later in the day with a completely stupid answer. They first gave me the definition of API (Application Programming Interface) and then tried to convince me to sign up for their affiliate program. WTF?!?! They also managed to include in the email that they didn’t offer an API. Okay, that’s fine. But did they have to include that other crap?

There is, however, a way to initiate calls using your account through web services but that just sounds like a stupid function to me. Phones today can store phone numbers and can be dialed by pressing two buttons. My approach to using the service is a lot more useful but Vonage doesn’t provide the information for anyone to actually build an application to access their services. This also seems to be a trend with most VoIP phone companies. I don’t think there is an API for Comcast Digital Voice and AT&T VoIP. So switching wouldn’t benefit me in any way. So, this screws me out of making an iPhone app as well for this service. I’ll put this on the back shelf and wait and see if API’s are released in the near future. Now, on to my other apps. The first one being “Eject!”.