I’m trying to ditch Skype. I’ve never used open protocol (e.g., SIP) telephony so I apologize for any profound ignorance that I display.
Here’s what I want to do:
-
sign up with a SIP provider, which will give me a telephone number to receive calls on, make calls from, and get my voicemail from
-
use that account with a MacOS X software-only VoIP application, free or otherwise, which can be bossed around by FileMaker (absolute requirement) and by the operating system / other software apps in general (desirable)
-
the two most obvious ways for which FileMaker (and other sw and the OS etc) to boss a VoIP application around would be:
3a. that it registered a URL type with the operating system, whereby it becomes the protocol handler for that URL type. Microsoft Lync, for example, uses “tel”, as in tel://12125551212; Skype once upon a time used “callto”, as in callto://12125551212. So if you clicked on one of those URLs, or you selected them as text and dragged to the desktop and doubleclicked the resulting “12125551212.inetloc” file, or you executed FileMaker’s Open URL script step on one of those strings, the application would come to the foreground, dialing the number that had been passed onto it; or
3b. that the VoIP software would be AppleScriptable — where something like “tell application ‘VoIPApp’; activate; dial number 12125551212; end tell”, executed as an AppleScript, would bring the VoIP app to the foreground and cause it to dial the number. FileMaker can perform applescripts so that would enable FileMaker to use the VoIP software; some other apps would as well, would be less able to deal with text clippings dragged from someone’s “contact me” page on their web site, so this is mildly less preferable than a registered URL type approach
4) I don’t need a whole lot of bells and whistles but ideally I’d like NO ADS, the ability to designate different Sound IN and Sound OUT devices than the operating system’s primary hardware as designed by the Sound Preferences pane (unlike Microsoft Lync for Mac which does not do this), a minimal-footprint interface (i.e., tiny floating window not a huge monstrosity such as Skype has become), the ability to record conversations and save as MP3 or AIFF or WMA or other audio format files.
I will repeat again that I am a total newbie. If you say something like “Have you looked at ZeelyBopper?” or “You’d be better off getting a HashTag device with an Acronym”, please be aware that I probably won’t have the vaguest idea what you’re referring to. Thanks in advance for overexplaining things to me like you’re addressing a massively ignorant person.