GrandCentral Dialer

I’ve been using GrandCentral for awhile now and think I have finally managed to get people to start calling that number. The flexibility is great; I can pick the phone I want to use and if I travel, I can set calls to goto my cell phone. If I’m around, calls goto my VOIP line. One of the interesting features they added to GrandCentral was the ability to call a Gizmo Project number as a calling number. Combine this with click to call on GrandCentral’s web site and I basically can get rid of a phone line. I currently have a BroadVoice VOIP line which costs me about $12 per month.

So the other day I was thinking, could I get rid of the BroadVoice number? After some searching, I found that Gizmo Project is a standard SIP provider and if you can configure the phone to connect to a SIP account, you can get it to work. OK, easy part done. Phone rings when my GrandCentral number is called. Next the harder part. I wanted to be able to dial any number via GrandCentral so a) it doesn’t cost me any money and b) the caller ID is from my GrandCentral number. A few web searches later, I found a perl script to do what I wanted. The UI, of course, is non-existent, so I put my Cocoa skills to the test. I started my little app yesterday and completed it this evening. I now have a little menu bar item that lets me select my “originating number” (usually my Gizmo Project number) and lets me dial any number. To top things off, I added a little AppleScript support so that I can dial from the OS X Address Book.

Very cool. It could stand to use a little more polish, but I’m pretty pleased with it. Now I have to contact GrandCentral/Google and see if I can use their logo as the menubar icon. I’m sure that will go over real well.

I still need to decide if I’m going to sell this or give it away. Hmmm. I think it hinges on what GrandCentral says. Can’t sell something if they get pissed at me.