GNOME "Telephony Application Programming Services" Proposed

[David Sugar <dyfet ostel com>]

Have you ever wondered why you have phone numbers collected in your
Evolution address book, and yet must manually re-enter numbers on your
office telephone when you wish to dial someone?  Would you like to be able
to receive pop-up notification on who's calling you with the ability to
route incoming calls you do not wish to answer under mouse control?  To 
mark specific calls as billable clients as they occur to track their time 
for automated invoicing?

We hope to be able to finally address these and other issues for both
GHOME desktop users and business application developers in a new free software 
package being proposed to be known as GNOME TAPS.  This being a project 
proposal, I am establishing a project outline and a set of goals.  With that, 
this announcement constitutes a call for help and request for input from 
other GNOME developers in establishing a functional implementation.

GNOME TAPS will offer a C callable library to easily integrate telephony
functions into existing GNOME applications.  It will use a common TCP
based backend protocol to communicate directly with office telephone
equipment and services, and ideally for use with free software based 
telephone systems such as GNU Bayonne.  It will include an applet to
pop-up and support handling of incoming calls.  It will include a gnome
control-center plugin for setting of telephony options.

The first goal will be to support and demonstrate a C callable library and
implement a backend service on GNU Bayonne to support the functionality of
dialing numbers that may be clicked on or otherwise delivered under
application control.  This would be followed by development of a GNOME
desktop applet to respond to incoming calls, and finally work on a
complete control center plugin to configure and manage GNOME TAPS.

Initial discussion and design planning for GNOME TAPS will be carried out
on a new mailing list, bayonne-desktop gnu org   This list is open to the
public and may be subscribed by sending email to
bayonne-desktop-request gnu org   Comments may also be sent to me
directly, to sugar gnu org